For years, Viktor Orbán, with his anti-migrant and white Christian nationalist rhetoric – sentiments that endeared him to Donald Trump and his Maga base – offered his European counterparts the comforting fiction that racism in the EU was the preserve of a few unsavoury men and women. Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.

Racism is not the work of one individual. It is structural. Racial logic is woven into our laws as well as our political, economic and social systems. It shapes access to jobs, housing, education and justice. It informs policing practices, border controls and foreign policy choices. Racialised biases are being stamped into our AI tools. A major scandal in the Netherlands arose because algorithms used to process childcare benefits wrongly flagged thousands of Dutch parents as fraudsters. A form of racial profiling left ethnic minority or migrant heritage families disproportionately impacted. The victims suffered devastating consequences including severe debt, forced evictions and wrongful prison terms and many are still struggling to recover.

Divisive “us and them” narratives are also consistently reinforced by political and media conversations that frame diversity as a challenge.

Discrimination in Europe today is rooted in age-old anxieties. Racial hierarchies evident in the EU’s migration policies – for instance in the different treatment of black and brown refugees and migrants compared with their white Ukrainian counterparts – go back to the “superior white race” arguments pervasive in the dark days of European colonialism and trade in enslaved people.

The fear that Europe’s population will be “replaced” by those from the global south is no longer confined to fringe conspiracy theorists. It is reflected in the calls from the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, for “very large-scale” deportations of “irregular” migrants. Or when Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister of Denmark who is often cited as a model for “progressive” migration control, insists on the need to limit “non-western” migration or frames Muslims as an existential threat by underlining that sharia “must never, ever become Danish”.

Ursula von der Leyen’s migration policies have normalised deportations, as well as deterrence by using technocratic language of “risk management”, “burden sharing” and “returns”. Underlying such actions is the perpetuation of an unspoken moral panic that borrows from the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. A similar fear of demographic change inspires EU efforts to fortify its borders and externalise migration control through cash-for-migration-control deals with Tunisia, Libya or Mauritania.

The difference is that while Orbán and his far-right friends openly champion whiteness, the EU’s politics of exclusion are cloaked in terms such as “social cohesion”, the defence of “European values” and debates on the “integration” of European Muslims. Such framing enables and amplifies deeply prejudiced narratives regarding who “true” Europeans are and whose identity and belonging must be constantly questioned and challenged.

In foreign policy, von der Leyen has been shown to promote “us and them” narratives. She has praised Ukrainian women as “heroes” and “leaders” while keeping silent on the struggles and political agency of Palestinian women. Such choices help to dehumanise some groups while elevating others, which are then viewed as more deserving of compassion.

This is why diversity training, action plans and worthy statements, and even improved representation of minority groups, while important, are not enough. And this is why Orbán’s non-participation in EU policymaking will not help create an anti-racist Europe, make the EU a better partner for Africa, more sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians or more active in trying to stop the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran. Even without Orbán urging them on, EU leaders will keep reproducing racial hierarchy through border controls, policing, citizenship rules and foreign policy.

Changing this dynamic is not easy. A deeper study of colonialism must be made part of our collective memory to ensure a shared reckoning of how Europe’s wealth, borders and ideas of civilisation were built through empire and racial hierarchy. These truths need to be embedded in our education systems and cultural institutions, not merely mentioned as footnotes in history books or explored in temporary exhibitions.

Hadja Lahbib, the European commissioner for equality, herself the child of Algerian migrants, recently acknowledged that racism “hides in habits, in assumptions, in systems we no longer question”. But the EU institutions that she and António Costa, the EU Council president, who is of Goan and Mozambican heritage, run are overwhelmingly Eurocentric and white.

Over many years as a reporter in Brussels, I was told that the EU was colour blind. After 9/11, when I questioned the surge in Islamophobia across Europe, the response was that the EU did not “do religion”. And in 2020, after the killing of George Floyd, senior EU officials insisted that unlike the US, the EU was not racist.

Today, questions on the EU’s legacy of colonialism and exploitation are also brushed off as a distraction. Yet without acknowledging Europe’s past, we will not be able to safeguard and futureproof liberal democracy in the face of external dangers and the dangerous whims and hallucinations of other Orbáns and Trumps – and the mainstream politicians who amplify their message.

• Shada Islam is a Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. She runs New Horizons Project, a strategy, analysis and advisory company