What Europe gets wrong about itself

Hans Kundnani’s new book ‘Eurowhiteness’ challenges the EU’s story about its founding based on trade, human rights and rule of law, excavating the role of race and specifically whiteness in Europe’s history. 

I don’t usually pay much attention to the speeches of EU officials, but for some strange reason in 2016, I found myself listening to Federica Mogherini, then the EU foreign policy chief, who was addressing an EU Culture Forum. It was a largely unremarkable speech; she carefully re-narrated a sanitised history of the EU, touting its inclusive credentials, until she uttered a remark that caught my attention. Mogherini explained that Europe is a blend of diverse influences: “Greek and Jewish, Roman and Anglo-Saxon, Christian and Arab, Latin and Slavic, French and German, Mediterranean and Scandinavian, religious and secular.” Much of what she said was quite pedestrian, but her acknowledgement of the role of Arabs in European history was important because back then most politicians rejected the idea that Arabs had made any contributions to European history, let alone the question of those contributions being constructive and generally argued that they posed a threat. 

Her view of Europe is a quaint one today as you look across these capitals. Georgia Meloni’s Fratelli d'Italia has installed itself in Chigi Palace, a party which even the late Silvio Berlusconi described as “fascist”. “Anti-Islam” Geert Wilders has won a majority in the Dutch parliament, Orban has been in power in Hungary for over a decade and with the exception of Poland which swung away from the far-right this year, parties espousing the direct opposite of Mogherini’s vision are either in coalition with mainstream parties or are currently driving a powerful rearguard action, pulling those mainstream parties to the right. Many are arguing, and with good reason, that something appears to have gone awry.

Not Hans Kundnani though, whose new book Eurowhiteness in many ways reads like a direct rebuke of the idea that Europe has suddenly drifted to the right in a nativist furor. He cogently argues that those ideas were swirling in the ether all along and have recently become more salient. In medieval times Europe had a lot to do with the frontiers of Christedom, but in the modern era (colonial to post-colonial) it has a lot to do with “whiteness”, which is Kundnani’s argument in a nutshell. The emergence of whiteness coincided and “overlapped” with the emergence of a distinct European identity and is associated with hierarchical forms of thinking about race: “for as long as Europeans have thought of themselves as European,” he writes, “they have thought of themselves as being better than the rest of the world.” 

In that regard, the EU hasn’t actually helped Europe exorcise its nativist demons as it often claims, he says. Europe has learnt a few lessons which he acknowledges. Nationalism is bad, irredentism too and genocide should never be repeated. But there isn’t much in these stories about colonialism or slavery, and so if anything, the EU has been a vehicle for Europe’s “imperial amnesia”: a redemptive project with a selection of tasteful myths which helped the continent recover from the horrors of WWII, whilst ignoring persistent racism within it and its colonial adventures abroad. 

Though times have changed, he writes, some fundamental features of European attitudes to the world haven’t because they haven’t really been addressed. In medieval times, Europe had a responsibility to convert heathens to Christianity; in the colonial era that became the mission civilisatrice. “In both cases, the civilising process was seen as good for those who were to be civilised - in the medieval period because it brought them salvation, in the modern period because it modernised or developed them,” he writes. Today the EU views itself as a model for governance and seeks to export its ideas, whilst protecting its borders from dangerous intruders. 

The EU was recognised for having brought peace to Europe in 2012 when it was awarded the Nobel Peace prize for successfully preventing wars in a continent that had been tearing itself apart in sectarian, imperial or ideological conflict for centuries. This was achieved by progressively removing hindrances to trade and movement within Europe goes the story – what Jurgen Habermas called “de-bordering” – and a shared commitment to human rights and rule of law. The vision of its early pioneers, such as Jean Monnet, Alcide De Gasper and Konrad Adenauer, was of a cosmopolitan Europe, committed as per its founding treaty in Rome in 1957, to an “ever closer union.” 

Ulrich Beck, another prominent German theorist and pioneer of the idea of a cosmopolitan Europe envisioned a “Europe of difference, of accepted and recognised difference.” Europe was no longer a constellation of wary states gazing suspiciously, and often enviously at each other, but was post-nationalist, having rid itself of its deadliest disease. Whilst this is indeed an enthralling and seductive story – so good that you wish it was true – Kundnani argues that the only way to buy into this idea is if you ignore the obvious. 

When the first iteration of the EU, the European Economic Community (EEC), was established for example it included Algeria, as a department of France as well as the colonial territories of several other countries, including Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands. As these colonies agitated for independence, their European rulers fought brutally to suppress nationalist sentiment, a fact which deals quite a serious blow to the “simple and encouraging local story” about the EU’s peaceful integration. Yale historian Timothy Snyder calls this “Europe’s dangerous creation myth”. “By 1945, European powers had not learned that war is bad,” Snyder writes. “They kept fighting colonial wars until they lost them or were exhausted by them. Remember Indochina, Indonesia, Algeria and Egypt; Malaya, Kenya, Angola, Guinea, Mozambique and the Spanish Sahara.” The EEC was initially a “territorial space stretching from the Baltic to the Congo and it was only from the moment when Belgium and France lost their remaining colonies in Africa that it in effect shrank dramatically to resemble Charlemagne’s Europe,” Kundnani writes. 

It was after the loss of empire that Europe turned inward, says Kundnani, becoming more parochial, although for the decades that followed France in particular continued its relentless interference in the affairs of its former colonies. The consequence of this was a tendency among European countries to view their own fascist pasts as the ‘Other’ and the EU as a peace project rescuing them from that – Spain and Portugal are illustrative examples. Germany even more so, having engaged deeply and seriously with the Holocaust whilst almost neglecting its prior genocides in Namibia. 

In tracing the history of this inward turn, we come to understand the point at the heart of Kundnani’s polemic. ‘Eurowhiteness’, a term he says he borrowed from American sociologist József Böröcz, is an “expression of regionalism, which we should in turn think of as analogous to nationalism”, he writes. Whilst the EU did indeed succeed at “de-bordering” Europe, this development didn’t coincide with a broader universal humanism, but re-established the old national boundaries at the EU’s new frontiers. That frontier psychologically has a lot to do with whiteness but has more recently gained salience, Kundnani argues. 

Questions about race and identity gained prominence in the second half of the 2010s, as populists emerged across the continent, conjuring up an idea of Europe centred more on ethnic, racial and cultural ideas as Europe’s distinguishing features. Some figures like Geert Wilders readapted this into a cultural rather than colour based racism but even then European culture was superior to all others. This development coincided with what officials across Europe and the press referred to as the “refugee crisis”, which summoned up fears about hordes of Muslims changing Europe’s demographics and threatening its fragile “way of life”. 

Sarkozy was one of the first major politicians to lean into this idea in 2012, the year the EU won the Nobel prize. At an election rally in Villepinte in northern Paris, Sarkozy said illegal immigration threatened the “implosion of Europe” and called on attendees to “save the European way of life” by voting for him. French voters didn’t buy it then and he was eventually defeated by Francois Hollande, who later bequeathed power to his protege Emmanuel Macron after his first term who saw off challenger Marine Le Pen. Whilst Sarkozy was later found guilty of corruption, Macron, taking note of Europe’s shifting tides, embraced that element of Sarkozy’s politics. 

Suddenly Islam, in Macron’s words, was a religion that was in “crisis all over the world” and like Sarkozy he too vowed to protect and refound European civilisation. Kundnani says Macron is a “key figure” in this jarring shift, as he seamlessly drifted to the right fearing a possible electoral blowout at the hands of Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National party. This impacted the goals and character of Macron’s EU engagement. Initially, L’Europe qui protège (Europe that protects) was in line with Jacques Delors vision of a social democratic union protecting Europe’s economies from the exploitation of global capital. Macron however now believed it was Europe’s culture and identity that needed protecting, argues Kundnani. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell captured those anxieties when he described Europe as a garden and the world surrounding as a jungle. “The jungle could invade the garden and the gardeners should take care of it,” he said with an inert expression on his face. Orban, an icon of the far-right, exhibits a similar ideology odyssey, albeit going much further than Macron to the right. 

These noble attempts to protect Europe from the ominous dark skinned Islamic blobs, clawing at its peripheries, rarely reflect on the dangers within Europe that might warrant a second look. Robert Fico, Slovakia’s new prime minister for example is an open admirer of Putin, a sympathy he shares with Geert Wilders, who also wants to pull the Netherlands out of the EU. A former Austrian spy chief issued a public warning about the far-right Freedom party’s links to Moscow. Amid growing expectations that it could win the 2023 election, the Freedom party released a video paying tribute to several fascists and the Nazis. This isn’t to mention the threat some of these politicians and their acolytes pose to Europe’s Muslim communities and people of colour more widely. The issue of far-right terrorism has now grown so concerning that both the EU and even the UN have recognised it. 

Measures to halt this far-right march haven’t been forthcoming though and in fact centrist politicians continue to attempt to appropriate their ideas. And yet despite all that, the most prominent danger remains us – the Muslims – and poor refugees fleeing conflicts that Europeans often have a hand in. The reason the far-right isn’t treated as a threat of the same magnitude is because it isn’t viewed as a danger to Europe’s identity. We are, as former Tory minister Sayeeda Warsi put it in her book, The Enemy Within. 

The impact of this new politics has been acutely felt by Europe’s Muslim populations who are highly implicated in this political shift but applies equally to communities who are perceived as not traditionally belonging in Europe. Kundnani quotes CLR James who said they were “in Europe but not of Europe”. For the most part Kundnani’s text is a critical examination of European political and intellectual history – unpacking how Europe gets itself wrong – but in his final chapter he attempts to chart a way out for a post-Brexit Britain, sunk in what Akala calls the “ruins” of empire. 

Speaking at the Oxford Union as the UK prepared itself to vote on whether it should join the EEC, Labour politician Barbara Castle challenged European parochialism, asking what kind of “internationalism is it that says that henceforth this country must give priority to a Frenchmen over an Indian, a German over an Australian, an Italian over a Malaysian?” Kundnani seeks to take inspiration from this current of thought on the British left to begin sketching out the more promising ways that the UK can re-engage with its post-imperial past now that it has exited the EU. 

Paul Gilroy’s idea of a “postcolonial melancholia” which Britain didn’t work through – the confusion experienced in the UK in the wake of its lost empire – is how he brings his argument to a conclusion. The memory of confronting German Nazism is a crucial part of British history and the growing awareness of the fact that it was Britain and the empire which led this struggle increasingly means Britain’s “finest hour” doesn’t lend itself neatly “to a nostalgia for a white Britain.” Indians, Jamaicans, Somalis, Yemenis and others fought the wehrmacht in Europe. By attempting to distance a more multicultural UK from a more homogeneous and racist Europe, Kundnani’s Eurowhiteness attempts to dissociate Brexit from nativism, by presenting evidence that Europe may well have more serious issues around race and racism, and that the UK is uniquely placed in Europe to chart a different future. The country is now led by a British-Indian prime minister and Scotland’s first minister is a Pakistani-Scot. The spirit which animated Mogherini’s speech, he would probably conclude, reflects realities in the UK more closely than the continent and until Europe takes a more serious look at the connection between whiteness and Europeanness, the continent will lag behind the UK.