Hans Kundnani: EU as a Racialised Project

Join us to discuss Hans Kundnani’s most recent book, Eurowhiteness: culture, empire and race in the European project.

The European Union is often seen as a cosmopolitan rejection of violent nationalism. Yet the idea of Europe has a long, problematic history – in medieval times, it was synonymous with Christianity; in the modern era, it became associated with ‘whiteness.’ Eurowhiteness exposes the EU as a vehicle for imperial amnesia. Narratives of European integration emphasise the lessons of war and the Holocaust, but not the lessons of colonial history. The EU is about power as much as peace – and civic ideas of Europe are being displaced by ethnic and cultural ones. Since the 2015 refugee crisis, whiteness has become even more central to European identity – a troubling new turn in Europe’s long civilisational project. It is time to confront the relationship between ideas of Europe and ideas of race. 

Hans Kundnani challenges us to question why the ethnic-cultural component of the European project has been hidden. How has Europe’s inward facing orientation limited its own self-perception? The euro crisis and 2015 refugee crisis exposed the intimate power of the concept of ‘Europeanness’. Revisiting the legacies of empire, the ‘civilising mission,’ Eurafrica, and Eurocentricsm, Kundnani argues that the decolonial project is stuck at the European level. Exploring the European mythmaking machine and its relationship to the institutional, indeed, we find ‘whiteness’ is at the centre 

• Hans Kundnani is a senior research fellow at Chatham House, and the author of The Paradox of German Power. 
• Discussant: Tim Beasley-Murray, Associate Professor of European Thought and Culture.
• Chair: Uta Staiger, Associate Professor of European Studies, and Executive Director of the UCL European Institute. 

This event is part of the [Black Europe] Speaker Series, organised by the UCL European Institute.  The series is part of our Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence (2023-26) programme, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme European Union.