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 ‘whiteness’ to describe a highly diverse (nationally, linguistically and religiously) union collapses far too many differences between 27 nations into one single alleged similarity between them. This thinking is all the more flawed because the original use of the term ‘Euro-whiteness’ highlighted precisely that there exist quasi-racial hierarchies of status between Europeans. 

The war in Ukraine today shows how some white Europeans can still find themselves on the receiving end of dehumanizing racism against more powerful rivals who do not hesitate to hypocritically play up their multicultural, multiethnic and multifaith credentials. To Ukrainians defending their homeland today against an invading army more racially diverse than their own, the idea that their whiteness is a privilege would sound bizarre and offensive.

It is also undeniable, as another accusation of the European project has it, that the history of EU integration is entwined with the twilight of European imperialism. Three of the six founding members of the EU in 1957 still maintained large colonial possessions, like France in Algeria and Belgium in Congo. 

But the European Union today is not the same as in the 1950s. It has of course added more members with complex colonialist legacies, like Spain and Portugal. But it also includes countries that, not only never had colonial possessions of their own, but were themselves subject to imperial designs of others. 

Central and East European countries were for centuries targets of colonialist exploitation and settling by Germany and Russia whose logic differed very little from the actions of West Europeans in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Other member-states in the Balkans and Mediterranean suffered long periods of occupation by imperial powers. Given that some of the critics of ‘Euro-whiteness’ are British, it is worth reminding that no less than three current EU members – Ireland, Cyprus and Malta – were colonial possessions of Great Britain.

Most arguments that the EU has become a civilizational, racial project hinge on a single issue: migration. When the EU succumbs to far-right tropes like ‘protecting the European way of life’, it indeed reproduces deep-seated views of white European superiority. But even if they appear very similar, anti-migration sentiment and colour-based racism of whiteness are not the same thing.

Moving beyond the fact that, seen in a global perspective, anti-migration politics is far from a white exclusivity (think of violent protests against migrants in South Africa), Europe has a long tradition of anti-migration prejudice against white Europeans. In my native Greece for example, anti-immigrant racism in the 1990s and 2000s was directed against white Europeans from Albania and ex-Soviet republics. After the EU’s enlargement in 2004, far-right leaders in Western Europe repeatedly stoked anti-migration sentiment against East Europeans. 

A major argument that the EU is becoming ‘civilizational’ is that Europeans have been much more welcoming of Ukrainian than of non-European refugees in recent years. This may appear true on the surface, but academic research shows that identitarian and racial concerns may be less important than other reasons for this difference. If anything, it seems that positive attitudes towards Ukrainians lead to more welcoming sentiments for non-European refugees as well. In short, opposition as well as openness to immigration are influenced by a complex set of factors that go beyond simplistic explanations about alleged civilizational or racial sympathies.

All this is not to say that colour-based racism is not a problem in the EU, along with many other forms of discrimination of course like anti-Semitism and hostility towards Roma people. The main problem with thinking of the EU in terms of ‘Euro-whiteness’ is that it confounds regional integration with a blanket view of racism as a problem that supposedly affects all European countries the same way. 

EU states with colonial legacies and large non-white populations face very different issues with race than states with little to no multi-racial experiences and very recent history of non-white immigration. The institutional and legal tools to address racial injustice are also different. The French republican view of citizenship posits a very different response than countries with an institutionalized policy of multiculturalism. Similarly, the process to accept racial diversity as an integral part of national identity will be much easier in a country like, say, Portugal than elsewhere. 

It is not denying the reality and severity of racism to say that the best way it can be tackled is according to each country’s history and experience. Important voices in the British debate for example have powerfully argued that ‘this is not America’, with reference to the dominance of concepts and jargon of racial justice imported from the US, a country with a legacy of regionally concentrated slavery whose lessons may not be relevant or applicable everywhere.

By the same token, shoehorning the European experience in a unified understanding of ‘whiteness’ does little to either understand the challenge of racism in Europe or help combat it. The reality is that every European country has its own path to take to negotiate questions of racial diversity, national identity and social justice. 

Rather than making Europeans come to terms with multiple legacies and problems of race, painting an already fractious and divided union with the same white brush would endanger the integrity of the EU while doing little to address the problem.

It is true that the ideal of European unity was born amidst a general oblivion about the Europe’s global role and problematic past. But acknowledging this is very different from saying that the EU must be understood in racialized terms that themselves, despite claiming to oppose racism, harden and essentialize racial categories in a highly diverse continent.