Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project

Eurowhiteness is the third book by Hans Kundnani, a think tanker and journalist who is currently an associate fellow at Chatham House. Kundnani’s first two books focused on German politics, but in Eurowhiteness he aims to deconstruct the founding myth(s) of the EU.

In a review for the Financial Times, Charles Emmerson, described Eurowhiteness as ‘a clear, elegantly written polemic. Some people won’t like it, which is probably why they should read it.’ The present reviewer can only subscribe to that conclusion. As Kundnani himself notes, Eurowhiteness is an essay. Importantly therefore, it is not an academic work and as a result, some readers will not enjoy reading Eurowhiteness, since on too many occasions Kundnani sacrifices analytical rigour for the apparent sake of maintaining an EU-skeptical narrative. Still, it may be useful to read Eurowhiteness, if only to recognise the typical logical fallacies that are replete in polemics. This review will just highlight a few. The most prominent one is the strawman. In Eurowhiteness, Kundnani builds a strawman of an EU that sees itself (or of pro-Europeans that see the EU) as a magical cosmopolitan realm bringing peace and equality to all peoples on earth. Subsequently he conveniently attacks that self-constructed strawman, presenting it as a critique on the EU (or on pro-Europeans). A second technique consists of muddling the distinction between the ‘EU’, ‘EU institutions’, ‘EU Member States’ and ‘Europe’, using these interchangeably in function of the EU-skeptical narrative according to which the EU incarnates, pushes or facilitates an ethnic and cultural, rather than a cosmopolitan and civic, version of European identity (‘Eurowhiteness’). One might think that this criticism is too harsh, since conflating the EU and its Member States is a typical error. Yet, in his book Kundnani also notes that the EU cannot take credit for Europe’s development policy since it is a policy ‘of EU member states as much as the EU itself.’ Kundnani therefore knows the importance of distinguishing the different European actors but seemingly chooses to ignore (or, conversely, recall) it when it suits the argument. Thirdly, Kundnani’s discussion of the colonialist origins of the EU seems to depend on a third cause fallacy, further supported by the muddling of the different European actors noted just now.

A cosmopolitan strawman

Kundnani starts the first chapter on Euroregionalism with a glaringly wrong interpretation of a statement by José Manuel Barroso at the occasion of the award of the 2012 Nobel Price for Peace. In his speech, Barroso noted that ‘the European project has shown that it is possible for peoples and nations to come together across borders. That it is possible to overcome the differences between ‘them’ and ‘us’.’ On this, Kundnani notes that ‘there is something rather Eurocentric in thinking of the EU in this way. In particular, by generalising about “peoples and nations” in the way Barroso does, it mistakes Europe for the world.’ It is rather clear however, that Barroso’s statement merely emphasises how archenemies can overcome their differences and that if France and Germany, or Germany and Poland could do so, anyone can. It takes a special kind of misreading to come to that of Kundnani’s whereby Barroso implied that the EU brings together all peoples and nations in the world.

That overarching critique, whereby the EU only brings together European peoples and nations, is rather evident and at the same time beside the point, since the EU Treaties never envisaged they would bring together all peoples and nations on earth. In light of this, it is also unclear what Kundnani means when he notes that the EU is ambiguous about its limits but that it has recently become clearer about them. Under Article 49 TEU (and originally Article 98 ECSC), Europe has always constituted the EU’s limits, and while the exact geographic limits of Europe may indeed be ambiguous, the EU has not clarified them recently. Kundnani’s resulting rejection of the EU as a cosmopolitan project, should be assessed in this light. Evidently, a project that under its constituent charter is limited to European countries cannot be truly cosmopolitan. However, this does not take away that the EU Member States, through the EU, have gone the furthest of all modern states in setting up a cosmopolitan-inspired project, albeit restricted to the regional (European) level.

Kundnani himself notes that after Brexit, he is an ‘outsider’ and that his critique on the EU should be read in this way is clear from his argument against Ulrich Beck’s notion of European cosmopolitanism. Kundnani wrongly claims that people are only ‘different but equal’ within the EU, juxtaposing this with the inequality between Europeans and non-Europeans in the EU. As an ‘outsider’, he thereby ignores that freedom of movement today does not even apply equally to all EU citizens within the EU. If one aims to criticise the idealistic notion of European cosmopolitanism, the first and most evident critique would be that freedom of movement still is a privilege for the economically active and the affluent but not a right for all EU citizens in equal measure regardless of their (socio-economic) status. Indeed, contrary to what Kundnani wrongly claims, not ‘all EU citizens were given the right to live in any member state they chose’ by the Maastricht Treaty. Just ask Mss. Dano and Alimanovic.

Kundnani’s ‘outsider’s’ critique further ties with his remarks on how the UK’s EU membership made it easier for Europeans than for citizens of Commonwealth countries to come to the UK. This aligns with a populist claim that was made during the Brexit campaign by the Leave side. Bruno Waterfield, the Brussels correspondent of The Times (a quality newspaper for UK standards), voiced that claim in the following terms: ‘why should a white Pole be able to come and work in London but not a brown Pakistani?’ The quality of the public debate on the EU in the UK was (and still is) so abysmal that this trope was never properly challenged by the Remain side, let alone by UK journalists. While Kundnani himself does not as such state otherwise, he also fails to clarify to the reader that the lack of possibilities for ‘brown Pakistanis’ to come to the UK was not the result of a ‘Eurowhiteness’ requirement under EU law, but of a choice by UK politicians. After all, under EU law the openness of EU Member States to (labour) mobility from third (non-EU) countries is largely in the hands of the Member States themselves. UK PM Rishi Sunak’s recent refusal to grant more work visas to Indians as part of a UK-India trade deal illustrates quite nicely that states do not need to be members of the EU to limit movement from outside ‘white’ Europe. Incidentally, this further suggests that Kundnani may be a bit naïve when he writes that ‘Brexit is a chance for the UK to become less Eurocentric.’ In addition, such statements in themselves come dangerously close to repeating the Leave trope noted above, since they suggest that it was the EU that somehow forced the UK to be Eurocentric and that only by leaving the EU may the UK go ‘global’.

European regionalism as nationalism

In light of the upcoming European elections, Kundnani’s essay contains an important and valuable warning to Europe’s center right parties. Over the past decade, the discourse of Europe’s far right parties has converged on the idea that European civilization is at risk, instrumentalised in such a way to create and exploit a divisive fear in citizens. Kundnani notes the appetite among center right parties to attempt to recuperate this discourse, illustrated by the choice by Von Der Leyen to make one of her Vice-Presidents responsible for ‘Protecting our European Way of Life’, later renamed to ‘Promoting our European Way of Life’. However, a reader unaware of the political spectrum in the European Parliament would think that there are only centrist-right pro-Europeans. In reality there are also (or even mostly) pro-Europeans in the S&D, Renew, The Greens/EFA and even GUE/NGL, and politicians from these political groupings have generally (although admittedly not completely) resisted the far-right’s civilizational siren calls. Yet, adding such a nuance would not fit the narrative of Eurowhiteness and is therefore left out of the essay all together. While otherwise Kundnani’s critique on the risk of cozying up to the far right’s discourse seems on point, he fails to explore two fundamental issues that are raised by his claim that European regionalism shares analogies with traditional nationalism.

‘European ethnoregionalism’ does not legitimise the EU

Thus, when Kundnani stresses how European far right parties seem united across national borders in their ‘ethnoregionalism’, he ignores that differently from traditional nationalism, such ethnoregionalism is not intended to legitimise and/or strengthen the polity in question (here: the EU) and instead is intended to weaken it. For the European far right, the globalist EU is part of the threat against European civilization. This for instance (and depending on the preferred conspiracy theory) because the EU is aiming to replace the different European states with one EU super state  or by putting into effect the ‘Kalergi plan’, because it aims to replace the diverse European nations with one ‘mixed race’. This is completely different from traditional nationalism the purpose of which is to legitimise the polity in question. Kundnani thus does not even begin to address the question of how concretely an anti-EU ‘ethnoregionalism’ could (or could not) morph into a pro-EU ‘ethnoregionalism’, after its recuperation by centre right ‘pro-Europeans’.

No EU control over the levers for identity formation

Secondly, when Kundnani comments on European identity formation, linking it to European regionalism, he somehow ignores that (the elites governing) modern states promoted national identity formation for the purpose of legitimising (the state and thereby also indirectly) those elites’ authority. As Hobsbawm explained in ‘Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality’, this process was enabled through the modern states’ control over mass media, public education and sports. Yet these are three domains over which the EU-elites (assuming they wish to promote European identify formation) have little control since these domains remain largely in the purview of the Member States. In legal terms we would say the EU lacks competence over these areas (or policies), while in sociological terms the EU lacks agency.

The EU’s original sin

The fourth and fifth chapters of Eurowhiteness present an account of how the EU is a colonial project in its origins and how effectively the EU followed a colonial ‘civilizing’ logic when it enlarged to the east after the end of the cold war. The argument here depends on the muddling of Europe-EU-EU institutions-EU Member States but, perhaps more importantly, it is never clear what Kundnani aims to show when he makes these claims. If they are somehow proof of the EU’s ‘Eurowhiteness’, this would still beg the question whether the EU is a mere vehicle or rather the instigator of ‘Eurowhiteness’. This again is the sociological question of the EU’s (lack of) agency noted above.

In any event, both claims also fail to convince on their own. According to Kundnani, the EU is a colonial project and colonialism is even the EU’s original sin (!). This would be so because the Member States needed the EU to keep hold of their colonial possessions after the second world war. Arguing as such, Kundnani seems to commit a third cause fallacy. That the loss of the EU Member States’ colonial possessions and the creation of the EEC occurred at roughly the same time can arguably be traced back to a shared (third) cause: the relative economic and geo-political decline of European states from the beginning of the 20^th century. This realisation led Europeans to set up supranational cooperation projects after the second world war (after failed attempts in the interbellum), in the hope of maintaining peace in Europe and of retaining relevance and autonomy internationally. If one wants to claim a direct causality whereby the EU itself is a colonial project, one would have to further show how this is the case (1) even though three of the six original EEC Members did not have any proper colonial possessions (anymore) at the time of the creation of the EEC, and (2) despite the fact that other European states that did have colonial possessions and that could have joined the EEC, did not do so.

To be clear, it is not argued here that the EU is an anti-colonial project as Mark Leonard claimed. The latter’s argument that ‘the bureaucrats who might otherwise have been administering European colonies ended up building the European bureaucracy in Brussels [and that therefore] the EU also has in its genetic make-up a rejection of colonialism’ is probably the most banal and misguided defense of the EU ever written, which Kundnani also rightly rejects. It is equally not claimed here that Europe’s colonial past is irrelevant for the EU. Immanuel Wallerstein in his World-systems theory showed how our colonial past has created unequal (economic, political and cultural) relations that have outlived the formal decolonisation period, and that continue to characterise current international relations. However, this is not a feature unique or even specific to the EU and, as noted above already, it is not clear what Kundnani aims to achieve by pointing to this problem: does he want to radically decolonise contemporary international relations, or merely decentre them? Or does he simply want dispel the illusion held by (only) a handful of naïve ‘pro-Europeans’?

Kundnani’s second claim, that the big bang enlargement of 2004 was somehow a Western-European civilisation project whereby the EU takes on the shroud of an empire, also fails to convince. This if only for the fact that EU membership is voluntary. No single Member State was forced to join the EU, or forced to be ‘civilized’, unlike the former colonies of (western) European states. Conversely, no Member State is forced to remain in the EU against its will. To be clear, Kundnani does not deny this but he also does not engage with this most fundamental aspect of EU integration. If he had, he would have to concede that if the EU is an empire, it is unlike any empire before in the history of mankind and, as result, EU Member States have effectively attained a higher level of civilisation between themselves.

Red herrings and stacking the deck

Kundnani also does not shy away from using judgmental language, disparaging the EU, thus relying on a red herring fallacy to divert attention away from the dubious claims that are actually made. Just by way of example, we can read that in the early 21^st century ‘the EU began the process of trying to create a constitution for itself. It did so in a typically elitist way through a Convention on the Future of the European Union led by former French president Valéry Giscard D’Estaing.’ (emphasis added) Kundnani thereby uses anti-elitist populist rhetoric, further conflating the Member States (in charge of Treaty revisions) and the EU, all the while misrepresenting the Convention process, which was less elitist than how both international agreements and national constitutions are typically drafted.

Throughout the essay, Kundnani ‘stacks the deck’, ignoring features of EU integration that do not fit his EU-critical narrative. Some have already been mentioned above, while other such omissions border on downright misrepresentations. For instance, and according to Kundnani, after the end of the cold war ‘[the EU] stood more for neoliberalism than the socio-economic model of the earlier phase of European integration.’ This is a puzzling statement since there never was a specific socio-economic model that was promoted by EEC law. In fact, there is and always has been a constitutional imbalance in the EU Treaties in favour of the market-making project. Social policy was originally excluded from the Treaties and was only introduced through the Maastricht Treaty (through a separate protocol, given the UK’s objections). Still now, the possibility to develop an EU social policy is strictly limited by the EU Treaties but in spite of this, the European Pillar of Social Rights was adopted in 2017. This has resulted in measures such as the minimum pay directive (so contentious that is challenged before the Court of Justice by Denmark) and the gender balance on corporate boards directive. These and other such measures have been welcomed as heralding a social renaissance, making it curious why Kundnani ignores this development in his critique on the EU as a neoliberal project. Also Next Generation EU, which could be seen as ‘green and digital Keynesianism’ is not easily characterised as a hallmark of neoliberal economic policy. The same goes for the unprecedented EU intervention in the energy markets following the energy crisis in 2022. Remarkably, all these measures are not acknowledged a single time in Eurowhiteness, which prefers to present the contemporary EU as neoliberal and asocial and which insists that President Macron’s appeal for a ‘Europe qui protège’ in 2017 has entirely floundered.

Brexit and imperial amnesia

After the first five chapters, which present a rather gloomy and one-sided picture of the EU, the sixth chapter comes as a surprise. In it, Kundnani laments how Brexit is viewed ‘in extremely simplistic binary terms’ and how we should rather approach it as a complex and open-ended moment in UK politics. No doubt that is true, but the same applies to the EU which does not receive the nuanced treatment which Kundnani has in store for Brexit. In contrast to how Kundnani pictured ‘pro-Europeans’ as naïve and self-deluded Europeans, he suggests that Brexit voters were so well informed that they understood the difference between intra-EU and extra-EU migration: ‘[the infamous] “Breaking Point” poster was frequently cited as evidence of the perceived racism of Brexit, even though the issue on which the referendum would have an impact was freedom of movement (that is, immigration from within the EU) rather than asylum policy.’ It is difficult to give credence to that suggestion, since a leading Brexiteer like Boris Johnson did not even know what a customs union was four months before the UK formally left the EU.

Kundnani argues that the British suffer from imperial amnesia rather than from imperial nostalgia. Whether that judgement on the British people is too generous can be left to sociologists to assess. More relevant for the present review is that Kundnani argues that Brexit presents an opportunity for the UK to address this imperial amnesia. In contrast to what applies to the UK post-Brexit however, ‘engaging more deeply with Europe’s colonial past could actually be a danger to the EU.’ Kundnani goes on to explain why this would be the case: where EU Member States would engage with their colonial past, they would do so individually. In some way that is unclear to the present reviewer, doing so ‘would actually pull member states away from a European identity and have a disintegrative effect.’ Kundnani continues by envisaging how western European states could also engage with their colonial past collectively but why they would want to do so, and why ‘collectively’ would per se have to be equated with ‘through the EU’ is not explained. Instead, Kundnani suggests that were they to do so, they would alienate the eastern European states that never possessed colonies. Ending with a non-sequitur, Kundnani concludes that therefore ’the EU itself may actually be part of what is preventing Europeans from engaging more deeply with their colonial past.’ This argument, figuring towards the end of the last chapter, is not elaborated and leaves the reader rather bewildered. At least the present reader cannot get rid of the impression that Kundnani compulsively constructed a Eurosceptic narrative, but one which does not actually help EU citizens (or ‘outsiders’) to better understand the EU.

Kundnani’s warning against the ‘European civilization in crisis’ discourse is on point. It is therefore disappointing that Kundnani presents a one-sided and negative narrative of the EU, instead of acknowledging more that the EU is merely a vehicle that can accommodate different projects within the contours of what the EU Treaties provide. What the EU stands for, is not fully pre-ordained. Instead, it is a complex and open-ended project. Its policies and whether it is neoliberal or social, a fortress or a sanctuary, amnesic or conscious of Europe’s colonial past, etc., is instead in the hands of European citizens when they vote in national and European elections.

Merijn Chamon is professor of EU Law at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Visiting Professor at the College of Europe, Bruges.