Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project – Challenging the narrative

All political projects have foundational myths and the European Union is no exception. In this short and punchy book, Hans Kundnani exposes the often hidden and frequently denied foundations of European integration.

Eurowhiteness challenges the narrative of the European Union as a benign peace project promoting liberal, cosmopolitan values in an increasingly fractured world. Rather, the book argues that the EU project has deep roots in the history of empire and white Christian cultural identity.

Kundnani persuasively argues against reading the EU as a post-national project. Rather than rising above the divisions and exclusions of 20th century state building, European integration simply moves those fault lines to the regional, supranational level.

Taking Benedict Anderson’s classic history of nationalism, Imagined Communities, as his starting point, Kundnani argues that the idea of Europe is even more imagined. European regionalism is not the opposite of nationalism, he argues, but operates with the same logic.

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In the chapter Ideas of Europe the author traces the emergence of Europe as Christendom, the geopolitical territory of the Christian church. As the Enlightenment displaced the power of religion, European identity became increasingly framed through the prism of empire.

Europe was no longer just morally superior but also defined as the epicentre of rationality and progress in contrast to the backwardness of non-white, non-European peoples. Kundnani reminds us of the racial prejudice that informed Europe’s foundational thinkers including Rousseau, Kant and Montesquieu.

Kundnani’s most interesting chapter takes us through the decline of European imperialism and the rise of what he calls the Community of Memory. Shattered by two world wars and racked with an impending sense of global decline, the European Union provided its member states with “a soft landing after Empire”.

Here the author sees the desire of the signatories of the Treaty of Rome to unite as born from a need to recover Europe’s global position of dominance. The common theme is the asserting of Europe’s civilising role on the world stage, first in the bipolar Cold War era and then in the ever more fractured multipolar era of authoritarian states.

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What is striking is the extent to which what Kundnani calls “imperial amnesia” seeps through the European integration project. It functions as a false rupture between the outdated imperial rhetoric of the white man’s burden and the EU’s contemporary self-image as a stabilising global counterweight to the threats of Chinese or US hegemony.

Even at the height of the EU as a social project before its neoliberal turn, Kundnani provides his reader with some uncomfortable reminders of the patronising and prejudiced attitudes of its leading politicians towards the non-white neighbours to the south. Such attitudes were not peripheral to their politics but constitutive of it and in turn of European integration itself.

Just as one of the self-justifications for Empire was the self-ascribed need to civilise colonised peoples, the same impulse drives the self-image of modern Europe as a civilising force in international relations.

Kundnani references the hypocrisy of the EU’s migration policy with its self-proclaimed liberal cosmopolitanism and declared respect for human rights

Of course, nowhere is this self-image more exposed than in the recent hardening of the borders of the single market and the outsourcing of the EU’s migrant management to failed states and corrupt regimes.

As the EU increasingly accelerates its internal “de-bordering” – of goods, services, finance and people – its external arm Frontex is actively “re-bordering” by erecting a virtual wall around the union and funding brutally cruel migrant detention camps in neighbouring non EU countries.

Sally Hayden’s powerful and depressing My Fourth Time We Drowned is a cautionary reminder of the conceit that is Europe’s sense of civilisational superiority when castigating others for human rights breaches that Europe’s leaders simply pay others to commit.

Kundnani similarly references the hypocrisy of the EU’s migration policy with its self-proclaimed liberal cosmopolitanism and declared respect for human rights. This is made all the easier by what he terms the EU’s recent “civilisation turn” since enlargement.

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The changing demography of the EU has had a political impact, with a return to an EU preoccupied with a cultural, read white Christian, self-definition. The creation of a Commissioner for the Promotion of Our European Way of Life speaks to the blurring of far-right Great Replacement conspiracies with centre-right concern about the impact of migration on European culture.

The rise of illiberal governments within the EU’s borders; the impact of far-right parties on the rhetoric and policies of the centre right; the contrasting treatment of refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine (“one of us”) and those fleeing wars in non-white, non-Christian countries – for Kundnani these are all signs of the European Union embracing, or maybe just remembering, its own essential Christian, imperial, whiteness.

The book finishes with a chapter on Britain’s exit from the EU. The author asks whether it provides an opportunity for creating a less Eurocentric UK.

Kundnani is the British born son of Dutch and Indian parents, a European foreign policy expert and one time “pro-European”. This background makes his critique of what he terms Eurowhiteness even more powerful.

For Eurocritical readers, such as this reviewer, his book will strike many chords. However, its real impact should be on those who continue to uncritically advocate for “more Europe” as the weight of Kundnani’s analysis is that we may already have had too much.

Eoin Ó Broin is a Sinn Féin TD for Dublin Mid-West