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 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 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 global 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.(2)
Identifying what Europe is as an ‘imagined community’ is fundamental to the discussion and
the earliest parts of the book deal with founding myths of the European Union and what we
might recognise as the EU’s storytelling or branding: 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 EU’s central values are clearly leave it open to
withering criticism in 2024.
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’(1). But it is as he notes a power bloc that is rapidly moving away from its nearly
evangelical promotion of itself 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 and uncritical militant support of Ukraine he notes is a
demonstration of this.
He notes that Eurowhiteness is an aspect of the cultural part of being European. Europe of
course isn’t a nation but he argues that 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 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 a uniformed, armed and 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 differently. He notes that it is a lot harder to find black and
brown people in the halls 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, European
Council for Foreign Relations, 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, 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 recent UK’s racist anti-immigration
panics have turned into pogroms in 2024. 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 at work and on campus. 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.
