Why Europe’s Unprecedented Anti-Racist Uprising Changed So Little
Five years have passed since George Floyd’s murder ignited protests across Europe’s major capitals. In Paris, demonstrators defied pandemic restrictions to march for Adama Traoré. In Berlin, 15,000 people gathered at the Brandenburg Gate. London’s Parliament Square overflowed with protesters lying prone, chanting “I can’t breathe” in solidarity with their own victims of police violence—names like Roger Sylvester, Smiley Culture and Mark Duggan. For the first time in modern European history, racialized police violence moved from the margins to the mainstream, forcing a continent that prides itself on enlightened values to confront its own contradictions.
Yet today, as right-wing parties consolidate power and “post-racial” rhetoric gains traction, the question lingers: what did those protests actually change? The answer is deeply dispiriting. Three interconnected barriers help explain Europe’s failure to translate unprecedented mobilization into meaningful change: deliberate epistemological erasure through banned data collection, colorblind national ideologies rooted in colonial amnesia, and fragmented policing structures that diffuse accountability until it evaporates.
The first barrier operates at the level of knowledge itself: Europe has deliberately made itself blind to the discrimination it insists doesn’t exist. Article 1 of the French constitution guarantees “equality of all citizens without distinction of origin, race or religion,” which courts have interpreted to mean that collecting racial data violates constitutional equality. As Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire stated in June 2020: “I remain against ethnicity statistics, which don’t correspond with French universalism… I don’t see their race, origin or religion; and I don’t want to.” The logic was circular: the French government claimed they could not be racist as long as they did not see race, and they could not measure racism because doing so would require seeing race. A 2020 study by France’s human rights watchdog Défenseur des droits found that young men who are Black or perceived as Arab or North African are four times more likely to be checked by police—but this remains one of the few quantitative glimpses into a system that obscures such patterns. Without official census data on race, even this figure relies on proxies and estimates.
Germany, haunted by its genocidal past, maintains parallel reluctance. Police statistics track nationality but not ethnicity or race, remaining blind to discrimination against second or third-generation German citizens of Turkish, African, or Arab descent. There is no centralized collection of data on police stops or violence broken down by race. When Berlin police were found in 2017 unlawfully recording Sinti and Roma suspects’ ethnicity, authorities intervened, as statistical collection of ethnic data is itself illegal.
Even the UK, which collects more data than its continental neighbours, maintains critical gaps. While tracking that Black people are 3.2 times more likely to experience police force, a 2023 UK inspection found that collecting ethnicity data is not consistently mandatory in recording victims of police violence. The inspection concluded that “failure to record ethnicity data was hiding the true disproportionality rate.” Clearly, European states have constructed an evidence vacuum that transforms documented discrimination into perception and anecdote. Protesters in 2020 found themselves arguing against an absence, trying to prove discrimination to institutions that ensured such proof could never be definitive.
The second barrier operates through national narratives that position each country as inherently beyond racism. French republican universalism portrays the nation as above ethnic distinctions, favouring a single, universal citizenship. German constitutional patriotism frames the Federal Republic as inherently anti-racist by virtue of rejecting Nazism. British narratives celebrate multicultural tolerance while forgetting the Windrush scandal, the 2018 discovery that Caribbean-descended British citizens were being wrongfully detained and deported. These colourblind ideologies perform the same function: defining the nation as post-racial makes structural racism conceptually impossible.
The geographic displacement of European colonialism makes this erasure easier than in settler societies. The German annihilation of the Herero people—the first genocide of the 20th century, which killed over 80 per cent of the Herero population in 1904—occurred thousands of kilometres from Berlin. Belgian forced labour that killed an estimated ten million in the Congo from 1890 to 1904 happened across an ocean from Brussels. French forced labour in West Africa, the construction of the Congo-Océan railroad, and British indentured labour systems all unfolded far from European eyes. This distance further enables contemporary nations to treat colonialism as a distant history rather than as the foundation of present-day inequality.
The pattern is also visible with the treatment of postwar guest workers. Millions arrived from Turkey, North Africa, and Southern Europe to fill labour shortages in the 1960s, only to face systematic segregation and denial of full rights. Their descendants have continued to face discrimination that European institutions struggle to acknowledge precisely because these nations define themselves as post-racial. This framing proved devastatingly effective against BLM’s transnational message. Officials expressed horror at Floyd’s murder while insisting such violence was distinctly American and unthinkable domestically. French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin argued for using statistics based on geography rather than race—simultaneously acknowledging inequality while refusing to name its racial dimension. Racism became redefined as individual prejudice rather than systemic reality. If racism is un-European by definition, calls for systemic reform become misguided attempts to import American identity politics.
Europe’s third barrier is structural. Fragmented policing systems diffuse accountability until responsibility evaporates. Germany organizes policing at the state level; 16 different forces operate under different rules. France maintains dual systems: the Police Nationale (Interior Ministry) and the Gendarmerie Nationale (Defence Ministry), plus municipal forces. Meanwhile, the UK has 43 territorial police forces in England and Wales alone. Local authorities claim they lack the power to make systemic changes—that’s a national issue. National governments insist policing is local—we can’t interfere with municipal autonomy. Therefore, no clear institutional target exists where pressure can produce change.
When BLM protests swept Europe in June 2020—consisting of 278 documented events with nearly 280,000 participants across Germany, Italy, Denmark, and Poland alone—governments responded with strikingly uniform deflection. Despite years of activism around Adama Traoré’s 2016 death in police custody and massive 2020 protests, substantive French reforms remain elusive. Germany held parliamentary hearings that produced sympathetic statements but no binding reforms. The European Parliament condemned Floyd’s death, yet concrete national policy changes never materialized. The UK announced use-of-force reviews that resulted in minor procedural adjustments. A 2021 National Police Chiefs’ Council action plan promised to “address race disparities,” yet inspections continue to find incomplete ethnicity data, persistent stop-and-search disproportionality (Black people are nine times more likely to be stopped), and Black police officers make up only 1.3 per cent of the force compared to 3.5 per cent of the wider population.
Understanding why Europe’s unprecedented uprising changed so little grows more urgent as “post-racial” narratives strengthen and right-wing parties consolidate power. However, the comparison with the United States reveals crucial limitations. Black Lives Matter emerged from a specific American context shaped by the particular horrors of chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, and ongoing police brutality against Black Americans. While racism is undeniably a global issue and BLM rightfully became a global movement, European colonial brutality occurred on entirely different continents than the white populations who benefited from it lived on. This geographic and temporal displacement makes it easier for European governments and citizens to “forget”—to treat colonialism as distant history rather than the foundation of present inequality.
An anti-racist movement targeting the specific European context—one that centers European histories of colonialism, guest worker programs, and contemporary segregation—might prove more effective at creating institutional change. The failure may not be that Europeans didn’t care enough about George Floyd, but that they were asked to mobilize around another history when their own remained unexamined and unacknowledged. Black Lives Matter’s transnational legacy in Europe is ultimately a warning: mass mobilization means nothing if states can deflect, delay, and diffuse demands until the streets empty and attention moves on. The protests of 2020 revealed not just the depth of racialized inequality in Europe, but the mechanisms through which liberal institutions protect themselves from demands for justice. That may be the movement’s most important, and most sobering, lesson.
Edited by Alexandra Agosta-Lyon.
Featured Image: A Black Lives Matter protest in London, UK, following the murder of George Floyd. Photo by James Eades is licensed under the Unsplash License.
