Europe so white? The EU must address its legacies of racism, but fixating on its ‘whiteness’ is not the way
Is the EU too white? A recent high-profile report by the think-tank ECFR seems to think so. It argues that EU elites have a ‘blind spot’ of how the union’s self-professed multi-national character fails to accommodate and reflect the increasing diversity of European societies. According to some commentators, the EU is degenerating into a so-called ‘civilizational’ entity, whose opposition to nationalism inside Europe plays out as racial hostility against non-Europeans. Its tacit embrace of racial uniformity, or ‘Euro-whiteness’, is not accidental. It continues a long tradition of conscious European superiority against non-white races. It is hard to deny that Europe must cope with difficult legacies of racial injustice, colonial exploitation and integration of non-European immigrants. But while all this is true for European countries individually, applying the concept of ‘whiteness’ to the EU and the ideal of European unity as a whole is wrong and unfair. First, using ‘whitene...