John Whipple reviews Hans Kundnani’s book Euro Whiteness – A critical look at the European project and its intersections with empire, racism and nationalism.
The impact and ideas of race are globally important to thinking about Europe, culturally, in ways which are comparable in the importance to thinking about race in the US nationally. The European Union began as a union of states which admittedly had imperialist pasts or depended on continuing campaigns for European supremacy on the global stage at the point of a gun. Kundnani’s book helpfully notes that the imperialism of capitalist European nation- states can not be conceptualised without ideas of racial hierarchy and national supremacy.
Whiteness for people of Europe is part of the cultural legacy of Europe’s global exploitation. It is more typical to read racial criticism applied to the history of European settler-colonial projects for dominance across the Americas, but Kundnani’s analysis holds a mirror up to European imperialism itself in a more general way and argues that the European Project has never actually reckoned with its colonial harms to black and brown people outside Europe, in the same way that it has with the Holocaust:
…the example of Germany’s approach to Namibia, a German colony from 1884 until 1915. While the Federal Republic accepted the principle of reparations in relation to the Holocaust as early as the 1950s , the “gesture of reconciliation” that it finally made to Namibia in 2021 was framed as aid, not compensation – a tendency that is common to “all countries involved in the European colonial projects”.
He argues the European Union is more generally a vehicle for cultural amnesia shielding Europeans from the necessary decolonial work of counting the cost to peoples across the world resulting from Europe’s collective colonial projects and empires. Some of his most interesting finds are based on the studies of Gurminder Bhambra who argues that the centrality of Western Europe’s empires is largely still unacknowledged culturally and that decolonisation can’t happen until Europeans see that empire is what constitutes European societies and states.
She argues that nations states in Western Europe should be understood as imperial states… [which] shaped the nation states they became after colonisation. Engaging more deeply with Europes’s colonial past would involve a recognition that…[e]mpire was not something that “happened elsewhere”. Rather, it made Europe what it became.
Identifying what Europe as an ‘imagined community’ is fundamental to the discussion. The first chapters of the book deal with founding myths of the European Union and what we might recognise as the EU’s storytelling or brand: its core values, its mission… But peace, openness, NATO and Frontex all fit neatly into the EU today. With the sickening hypocrisy over Gaza and Ukraine, the idea of EU in 2024 is open to withering criticism.
The EU promotes itself as and wants to be seen as example for other war-torn areas to follow. The objective was to make war between France and Germany ‘materially impossible’. The EU is a power bloc that is rapidly moving away from its nearly evangelical self-promotion as a Nobel Prize-winning model for the unification of civic nationalisms as a methodology for peace. Instead it is moving to a defensive identitarian union for those who belong by blood. Its uncritical overwhelming military support for Ukraine is an example of this.
Kundnani notes that Eurowhiteness is an aspect of the cultural part of being European. Europe of course isn’t a nation but strengthening the shared regional identity is part of the European Project. He explores the sources of nationalism, the idea of race, the idea of whiteness and the origins of the idea of Europe. He asks us to see regionalism as analogous to nationalism, and, as we do, we see Eurowhiteness with it: a violent inclusion for some, and violent exclusion for others; soft borders to the East, but an armed, unifromed hard border to the south. The dividing line goes back to the 16th century ideas of race developed in Europe for the management of global workforces, structures of control, and capital.
This is a personal book, but it is also an informative, engaging perspective on the culture of the EU and the inescapability of dealing with race in dealing with Europe. Kundnani’s own identity makes his personal perspective and his curriculum vitae more interesting. He refers to his experience and his readings while creating a helpful counter perspective. Kundnani genuinely wrestled with his centrist and social democratic politics and found that the EU is not acting as force for good in terms of global justice. He says he never felt “100 per cent European”: though his mother was Dutch, his father was Indian. Unsurprisingly as an Oxford graduate, he actually grew up in the UK which he seems to feel ‘did diversity better’ than many EU countries. He notes that it is a lot harder to find black and brown people in the halls of EU power since Brexit. After a master’s in journalism at Columbia in the US, he worked for six years at the influential centrist pro-NATO think tank, the European Council for Foreign Relations(ECFR), as an editorial director. He saw the austerity meted out on Greece and Ireland from the inside and learned more and more about the EU as he worked for The Council between 2009 and 2015.
The Council is where former ministers from all EU countries are invited to accept on a three year term to participate on the work ECFR a private-run donation-funded (NATO is one of its donors) not for profit foundation. He doesn’t claim to have had a Damascus Road moment but instead says that his feelings about the EU changed gradually and he began to see that much of the EU’s history is a myth and ‘the product of a kind of self-idealisation’. He fairly notes that the EU itself was also changing over those 6 years he personally spent at ECFR. Resultingly he became more critical and progressively, rather than dramatically, identified less with the EU. The book is written for the comfortably vague mission to ‘persuade Europeans that a different Europe is needed than the one we currently have.’ He was also programme director at Chatham House also known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, who give awards to people like Hilary Clinton, Donald Tusk and Volodomyr Zelenskyy, while celebrating David Attenborough, Greta Thunburg and Melina Abdullah. The final chapter has interesting insights about Brexit, the events preceding it in the 2010s, and the fall out workers in the UK and EU are experiencing now. Arguably it has taken the UK further from any path toward global justice and the racist pogroms across the UK this summer are evidence of this. Ireland is not immune to the same xenophobic propaganda as we see rightward turns from FG’s Helen McEntee and SF’s Mary Lou McDonald.
Eurowhiteness is a helpful book for workers in Europe who want to build working class power here and need to have discussions on race where they work and where they study. It is especially helpful to those who might find discussions of race too focussed on the US context. Perhaps most importantly it informs our fight against the xenophobic racist far right anti-migrant rhetoric in Ireland in our working communities, amongst the youth and online. Anti-capitalists might argue a full reckoning with the racist history of European imperialism is impossible while we still live under capitalism. Kundnani, no revolutionary, asks the reader to open their eyes to the racism demanded of people in Europe itself to merely avoid discussions of decolonialism in the European Union even today by examining the fundamental positive myths of the EU. He asks that European history – often taught as a closed system of European figures and European countries interacting with each other in Europe – be opened up to show the full impact of Empire. Only by doing so collectively can Europeans reckon with Eurowhiteness, an ethnonationalism for Europe as a region. The work of acknowledging and understanding Europe’s colonial role and imperial history is an important part of the fight against racism on the rise everywhere in Europe. A continuing development which ultimately divides and harms us all and must immediately be smashed wherever it appears.
