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Hans Kundnani, "Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project" (Oxford UP, 2023)
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An interview with Hans Kundnani
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Hello everybody.
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This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to New Books in European Politics. I'm Tim Jones and my guest today is Hans Kudnani, author of Euro Culture, Empire and Race in the European project published on August 17th by Hearst. He writes, quote, today's pro Europeans would be horrified at the suggestion that their idea of Europe had anything to do with whiteness. In fact, many would find the attempt to link the two baffling and outrageous. However, this book argues that not only is pro Europeanism, quote, analogous to nationalism, something like nationalism, but on a larger continental scale, but the EU itself has become, quote, a vehicle for imperial amnesium and therefore promotes and privileges whiteness. Hans Gundani is a fellow at the Open Society Foundation's Workshop and an associate Scholar at the Royal Institute of International affairs at chatham house. From 2018-22, he was full time researcher at Chatham House, including as director of the Europe program. In 2014 he published book the Paradox of German Power. Hans, welcome.
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Thank you very much, Tim, for having me.
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Let's start with your introduction. And there you describe Euro Whiteness as a rather personal book. Can you explain why?
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Yeah, I mean, obviously it's a book about Europe and the reason it's personal is because I think I probably have a quite particular relationship with Europe and European identity that has to do with My has to do with my family. So my, my, my father was Indian, my mother's Dutch, and so I have, but I, but I, but I'm British and I, you know, grew up in, in, in London and spent most of my life in, in London. So I'm sort of British through and through in that sense. And so I think my perceptions of Europe and the way I think about the idea of Europe and, and, you know, the way in which I think about my own European identity, I suppose, I think has a lot to do with that background. And in particular, you know, the fact that I have a, you know, one parent who is from an EU member state, a founding EU member state, which I think in a way makes me think of myself probably as being more European than, you know, say, a Brit who just has two British parents. Right. It doesn't have any particular relationship with any other EU member state. But then on the other hand, you know, because of, because my father was Indian, you know, I have one parent who is not from Europe from, you know, the country outside of Europe that was colonized by Britain. And so, and so I, you know, I think what that has meant for me is that I've always thought of myself as being European to some extent, and as I say, in some ways more European than some Brits. But at the same time, I've never been able to think of myself as, as being fully European, being 100% European, as I've heard some people describe themselves. And actually it was that sense of, you know, one of the things which first started that made me start to think about some of these questions was precisely when I heard some of my colleagues at the European Council on Foreign Relations, this think tank, foreign policy think tank that you mentioned in your introduction. When I heard them sort of proudly describe themselves as being European, you know, I can remember, for example, a colleague of mine, German colleague, you know, who. Who had a kind of a, you know, a sticker on his, you know, I guess his diaries, calendar, or a notebook that said, you know, I'm European, exclamation mark, in this kind of proud kind of way. And I found it quite difficult to relate to those kind of. That sort of feeling of being proud of being European. And so I started to think about why that was. And in a way, as I say, I think that's kind of a little bit the sort of beginning of the process that ultimately led to this book.
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As you say, you write that while you were at the ecfr, you started to think that the founding story of the Union Was, quote, actually a myth and the product of a kind of self idealization of the eu. End quote. I mean, I did wonder when I read that. I've heard stories about, for example, Tucker Carlson was quite a normal conservative and then he lived next door to some insufferable left wing neighbors and it sort of drove him mad. I wondered whether being surrounded by people who were just excessively pro European in a sort of knee jerk federalist way that perhaps made you. And Gisela Stewart was another example. Was there anything like that at ecfr?
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Well, God, I hope I'm not like Tucker Carlson. I mean, Gisela Stewart I can just about live with, but Tucker Carlson, not so much. I mean, I think there was a bit of that, but the way I think of it is slightly different in the sense that when I look back now, I realise that I didn't know very much about the EU. Actually when I first started working at ECFR, which was 2009, I thought I did in the way that I think a lot of people think they do, precisely because there is a certain sort of idea of what the EU is and what it stands for that has become quite prevalent. And this is precisely what I mean by the self mythologization. There's this sort of, in the first chapter of the book I talk about the myth of cosmopolitan Europe. This is the idea that the EU is an expression of cosmopolitanism that, you know, is pretty central to this way in which the EU is perceived even by people who don't know it very well. So I think what happened was that when I was at ecfr, I sort of, you know, I sort of arrived there as basically a pro European who basically thought the EU was a good thing, but without really actually knowing that much about it. And so then I guess two things happened at the same time. One was that I started to sort of learn more about the eu. I started to sort of go back and read about its history much more and learn much more about how it functioned both internally and externally, in other words, beyond Europe. And so that sort of was part of why, I think I started to sort of see this disconnect between the way that the EU is mythologised, the way that it's perceived, and then the reality of the, you know, the real existing eu, as it were. But then the second thing that was happening at the same time was this was a period of sort of transformation in the EU, you know, from the euro crisis which began in 2010 onwards. And so on the one hand I was, you Know, my own perception of the EU was changing, but at the same time the EU was itself changing in a bad way, I thought. And so, you know, the second book that I wrote, which you mentioned, the paradox of German power, you know, very much came out of that moment, this sort of Euro crisis moment, and especially the debate about German power within the EU that was taking place at that time. And so I suppose in a sense that was the sort of first stage in a way in me sort of rethinking Europe and essentially finding it harder and harder to identify with it in the way that I had done previously. And so, you know, in a way also the book was part of the process of thinking about this stuff over the last couple of years. And writing the book was also for me partly a, of trying to clarify in my own mind how much of this was about the way that the EU has changed and how much of this is just about the way that my perceptions of the EU have changed. You know, that was in a way part of why I wanted to write the book was to clarify some of that in my mind.
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Okay, well, we've set the stage for the writing of the book. It's a short book and you take the reader through a historical journey through the development of the European identity from Christendom to the coincidence of the Enlightenment and colonialism to pan European movement coming the First World War and where we've got to today since the Second World War and the Holocaust. Can you, can you take us through the argument in a, in summary form?
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Yeah, so I guess so basically what I was trying to do was look at ideas of Europe and European identity through history. And so the chapter two, which is basically what you're describing, tries to look at that story from classical antiquity through to World War II, essentially. And then the rest of the book looks at ideas of Europe in the context of the post war integration project that becomes the eu. But chapter, the chapter, you know, chapter two sort of tries to look more historically at this. And in particular, I guess the story I tell is, I mean, obviously there's this sort of prehistory in classical Greece, which is obviously where the name Europe, Europa comes from. But the real story, I guess begins in the medieval period where what it means, Europe is synonymous with Christendom, and what it means to be European is basically synonymous with being Christian. And the idea of a European identity emerges out of that kind of medieval context where it's very much synonymous with Christianity. And gradually then the idea of Europe starts to sort of usurp as One historian calls it usurp, the idea of Christendom or Christianity, but during the medieval period, they're very much synonymous. And the embodiment of that medieval idea of European identity, which is synonymous with Christianity, is Charlemagne, who remains this sort of icon for the current eu, Right? I mean, in particular, something, if you think about something like the Charlemagne Prize, the most prestigious prize for pro Europeans, is ordered in the name of. In the name of Charlemagne. So. So that's the kind of medieval idea of. Of Europe and European identity. And then what happens in the modern period is something much more complicated where, you know, on the one hand, you have this emergence of a new sense of European identity, what Europe stands for, based on, you know, the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution and so on. So it's a sort of rational, rationalist idea of Europe as opposed to a religious one. And actually secularism itself becomes quite central to that, right, in contrast to the older medieval version where Christianity was central. But at the same time as this rationalized, rationalist kind of identity, one also has to understand the emergence of that modern European identity in the context of originally the sort of age of discovery or exploration. But then that becomes, you know, European colonialism and in particular, the sort of encounter of Europeans with the populations of Africa and Asia and in particular the Americas. And in that context, the sort of more modern idea of Europe that emerges is also very closely connected to the idea of whiteness. The two concepts, the sort of modern idea of European identity and the idea of whiteness, you know, emerge roughly in the same kind of context and are quite closely connected again. And so, you know, and, you know, it's. It's, in a way, it's sort of, you know, sort of obvious that, you know, I think. I think it's more obvious to people outside of Europe than it is to people within Europe. But it is kind of obvious that Europeanness and whiteness are sort of very closely connected. One illustration of this that I often mention is that, you know, if you think about, say, apartheid South Africa, where you had, you know, benches, some of which said whites only and some of which said Europeans only, and it was, you know, understood that they meant the same thing, you know, and. But. And that's an illustration of, I think, a wider connection between those two kind of ideas. So, you know, that's really the argument in that sort of second chapter. And so what it basically tries to do is kind of set up the history of ideas of Europe before the European Union really gets going. And then the assumption that, I think a lot of people pro Europeans make is that after 1945 you get this completely new idea of European identity that has nothing to do with these older ideas that have to do with Christianity and whiteness. But I think, you know, if you think about this, you know, for five minutes, you start to realize that the history is much messier than this. And that actually these older, basically ethnic, cultural ideas of Europe don't just disappear after 1945, but they continue and they inform the post war European project itself.
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I'd like to come back to that elision between European regionalism and Euro whiteness. But before that, could we discuss this new way of looking at European integration since the end of the Second World War in terms of empires rather than being built by empires rather than nation states. And you are now writing in what is developing as a traditional. People like Timothy Snyder, Megan Brown, Sina Larson are writing about this idea, which seems to me to be well borne out by the facts. But could you talk us through that?
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Yeah, I mean, here I should emphasise that really I'm not saying anything at all original in this part of the argument and I'm drawing on the work of other scholars, some of whom you've mentioned. I'm really just basically reproducing their work. And what's extraordinary to me actually is that, as you say, you know, there have been multiple scholars now that have done this work on the, basically the intersection of European colonialism with European integration. And yet, you know, this has been going on for, you know, at least a decade and. And yet this hasn't penetrated at all into the sort of European policy world that I to some extent still inhabit, but certainly was inhabiting when I worked at ecfr. So if you tell people, and you know, these are people who work on Europe and the eu, you know, it's a full time job, right. And who consider themselves pro Europeans and consider themselves experts in Europe and are quoted in the New York Times and so on. If you tell them, you know, about this early period of European integration, you know, which was in part about trying to consolidate French and Belgian colonies in West Africa and Central Africa. That was part of the original point of the, of the European project, you know, I call it the original sin of European integration. In my book. They're simply not aware of this history at all. They have essentially a very ahistorical idea of the early phase of European integration. This is what I meant about the self mythologization, right? In particular, this idea of the EU as a peace project, which is not completely Wrong. It's just, it's very incomplete in the sense that at the moment when Robert Schuman announces the Schuman Plan, which is often seen as the beginning of the EU as a peace project, France is fighting a brutal colonial war in Indochina. And similarly in 1957 when the treaty of Rome is signed, France is fighting a brutal colonial war in Algeria. So the idea that Europeans simply renounced war after 1945 and embraced this idea of peace, as I say, is very incomplete. What they'd essentially decided to do was to renounce war between each other, but certainly not in the world beyond Europe. So that's all, as I say, been shown very, very clearly and very persuasively by multiple scholars. Probably the most important book, I think on this is Pio Hansen, Stefan Jansson, Eurafrica, which wasn't the first account of this, but is I think the most definitive account of this thing that was called the Eurafrica Project, which was precisely about, you know, European integration, but including Africa as Europe's plantation. I mean that language was, was used. And you know that, you know, as I say that, that that's been shown very clearly. We know now about the colonial origins of the eu. But what's extraordinary and part of what prompted me to write this book was it doesn't seem to have penetrated, you know, beyond academia into the, into the policy world.
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Coming to the, the elision between regionalism, which I think you make a very fine point there, which is that many pro Europeans and you know, I would add myself to that cohort, probably would consider themselves internationalists and cosmopolitan, whereas in fact what they are is regionalist. It's a very big region, but that is what we are. And I would also accept that Europe has historically been everything you said, but I wonder whether it is in its nature that thing. And for example, you quote this American Hungarian sociologist Joseph Buruch, talking about Euro whiteness, but also how Eastern European, Central and Eastern European countries in their craving to join the European Union qualified as having something called dirty whiteness, which was aspirational and seeking acceptance to the in group. It felt to me that that was a concept too far that Central and Eastern Europeans. And now you're seeing it with Ukrainians and Georgians and Moldovans. Yes, by being outside the European Union, they consider themselves to be second class Europeans. And there is certainly a, there is a strain of thought within the European Union that would probably agree with that. But why does it have to be defined in terms of whiteness or dirty whiteness? Isn't it just an in group and an out group.
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Okay, so there's a few different things there. So let me start with this question of the sort of evolution of the eu, because I think you're right that, or at least I agree with you, that having sort of established now the colonial origins of the eu, I think the question does then become, okay, so then what happens after those French and Belgian colonies in Central and West Africa become independent roughly in 1960? And there are a number of different ways of thinking about that, and it's a complicated story. And what I try to do in the remaining chapters in the book after that is to try to give one interpretation of what's happened to the EU after that. But it's not at all meant. It's not meant to be definitive at all. It's not even complete. It's a short book, as you mentioned, but I guess roughly that has now, in a way, I think, become the sort of default pro European position. Once you accept, because it's impossible to deny it, that the EU was at the beginning, a colonial project, when you can no longer sort of reject that, deny that, then the sort of default, I think, pro European position becomes, well, okay, yes, it may have been like that at the beginning, but then basically after 1960, it stopped being a colonial project. I think. I don't get into this in much detail in the book, but I think if you look. Look at particularly France's relationship with its former colonies in Africa after they've become formally independent, I think it becomes quite difficult to deny that there is a neo colonial element to French policy. But then also that becomes part of the EU's approach to Africa. If you think about, say, something like the cfa. Frank, there's a fantastic book on this, came out a couple of years ago, Africa's last colonial currency, it's called. And this has now become sort of an issue at the moment with discussion around creating West African currency union partly to escape from the cfa. Frank, you know, that that's just one illustration of, I think, you know, the way in which one. One needs to at least think about some of the continuities after formal decolonization. This story doesn't just kind of end at that point. The story I try to tell in the book is a slightly, you know, focus on different aspects. And in particular, it tries to look at the way that after the loss of those colonies, there is the beginning, I think, of a much more civic idea of Europe which focuses on things like the social market economy and the welfare state and Also the sort of depoliticised mode of governance that European integration creates. And then the way the sort of story develops later on is that in the last decade or so, I think the EU is moving away from that civic identity back to something more ethnic and cultural again. But that's at least the sort of the interpretation of story of European integration that I have in the book after the loss of those colonies, after the end of the EU as a colonial project. And then a part of that story is the other thing you asked about, which is the role of enlargement, and in particular the enlargement in the 2000s to include Central and Eastern European countries, the so called big bang enlargement. And I think there's quite a complicated story to tell there. But it roughly, I suppose, has two sides to it. On the one hand, you know, it's clearly true that the, that Western Europeans basically look down on Central and Eastern Europeans and they basically. I mean, the way that the EU puts it was that, you know, as it does with all accession countries, is that they need to do structural reform. But I mean, the EU does this even with EU member states, I suppose in the context of the Eurozone especially, but certainly with accession countries, they need to do structural reform. But you can also think about that whole process in terms of kind of a civilizing mission, essentially. And there's an academic, Janjalonka, who was at Oxford for many years at St. Anthony's who made this argument that the EU had a kind of new postmodern civilizing mission in its neighborhood after the end of the Cold War. And that I think in turn fits into a longer story going back to the Enlightenment of the way that Western Europeans have basically looked down on Central and Eastern Europeans as being in need of civilization. But there's also a flip side to this, which is, you know, I guess more from the perspective of those Central and Eastern European countries themselves. And it's captured in particular by this idea of the idea of a return to Europe. I mean, the accession of those Central and Eastern European countries, Poland and so on, to the EU was thought of by people in those countries as being a return to Europe. And I think it's a really interesting sort of enigmatic kind of phrase, return to Europe. Because if you actually start to think about what it means, and in particular if you ask, well, in what sense is it a return to Europe, in what sense were they returning to Europe? In other words, the idea of a return to Europe, there's something that they were once part of which they're now rejoining. Right. But if the argument of pro Europeans that the EU represented this kind of break with European history, and so what is created after 1945 is this completely new idea of European identity that has nothing to do with these older ethnic cultural ideas of European identity and is really just about the social market economy and the welfare state and the depoliticised mode of governance that the EU stands for, then Central Eastern European countries were not returning to that because they'd never been part of that at all. So the implication of the phrase a return to Europe is that the Europe that they were returning to was a Europe that's understood in a slightly different kind of way, a kind of civilizational kind of way. And that's why I then suggest, drawing on Joseph Boris work, that there's a way in which we can think of the return to Europe as a kind of return to whiteness.
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I mean, that's a very interesting point in terms of the return to Europe, but again, I would quibble with that because. I see, maybe, and this is certainly the case with Viktor Orban and Kaczynski, that's certainly the Europe they want to, in quotes, return to. They want to return to a Christian Europe and they want to put the Western European liberals right and restore Christendom. But of course, these countries are not one thing and they're not static. You know, half of, as you saw with the presidential vote in Poland a few years ago, Poland is as split between, between regions and between metropolitan areas and rural areas as the UK is, as the US Is that essentially, yes, there's one group of right or center right parties and voters in these countries that are looking for a restoration. And then there's another part, and you're seeing it in Ukraine, you're seeing it in Moldova, of people who are craving that rule of law liberalism and so on. So I wonder whether you're looking at these issues maybe statically rather than dynamically.
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And clearly it is a, you know, it is a complicated story in each of these different countries. And then, as you say, there are different currents within each of these countries. So, yes, of course, it's a complicated story, but I suppose my, my response to you would be that I think the view that I'm describing is more widespread than you're suggesting. It's not just Auburn. I mean, in any case, you know, Auburn's an interesting case. Right, because, because he didn't, he wasn't always like this. Right. You know, his views have evolved over time, you know, and one of the expressions. One of the sort of manifestations of that was the way that he was in the European People's Party for a very, very long time. Right. He became more radical over time. And I think one has to try to interrogate what happened, why that happened. And I think a lot of the writing that you see about this on Hungary and Poland, that focuses on the concept of populism. I'm thinking here of, you know, Anne Applebaum and people like that, they really have nothing to say about what, about. About how and why this happened, except these are some bad people, right? So I sort of sometimes think of this as the sort of stupid people and bad people thesis that they were, you know, that basically, you know, what's happened in our politics over the last decade, as you say, not just in Poland and Hungary, but in Western European countries or in the United States as well, is that there were some stupid people, and the stupid people got duped by the bad people. And that seems to me entirely inadequate as an explanation of what happened. I think we have to. And this is in a small way what I was doing in that section of the book on Central and Eastern Europe and on the enlargement process is I think we have to go back and look again at that history in the 1990s to try to understand how it produced Auburn and peace in Poland. And I think part of the answer to that question, I don't want to overstate it, but I think part of the answer to that question is that some of these. These more problematic ethnic cultural ideas of Europe were there from the beginning and not just among the far right. So I mentioned briefly, you know, this very famous essay that Milan Kundera writes in the 1980s, which, you know, coincidentally has just been republished. And, you know, people are discussing it again also in the context of the war in Ukraine and so on, you know, and this idea of, you know, a civilization Europe is very much there in Kundera, and Kundera is not the person you would necessarily associate with Viktor Orban or with peace in Poland now. So I think some of these ideas of a sort of civilizational Europe are actually much more prevalent in Central and Eastern European countries. And I think you'll stress them. One example of that is one of the immediate consequences of the enlargement in the 2000s was to strengthen the bloc of countries that wanted to write into the European Constitution, which was then being developed, you know, ultimately was rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands and then got repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty. But, you know, at that time, the enlargement of Central to include central and Eastern European countries had the effect of strengthening the block of countries that wanted to write into the European constitution that Europe was Christian, that that is part of, you know, what Europe stands for and what its identity is. And as I say, that wasn't, you know, these kind of far right populist governments in those countries like Poland. This was, you know, governments that we would now think of as being centrist and standing for all the things you mentioned, the rule of law and liberalism and so on. So I think it's, you know, these ideas are more prevalent than you're suggesting.
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C
Well, again, I think those things were always there, you know, Adenauer and European Christian democracy generally, many of the founders of the European Union. That's exactly how they saw it. They saw it as a, As a bulwark against atheistic communism.
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Exactly.
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Yeah, exactly.
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And so really, you know, and I talk about that in the book, in that early period of European integration. So I think, you know, it's a little bit reductive, but the story I'm roughly telling is that those elements of a sort of Christian Europe were very much there from the beginning. It was a big part of what was driving the early phase of European integration. And then I think they get a bit diluted over the next few decades. And then my whole argument is in the last decade in particular. But I think this does go back to, has a slightly longer history going back to the end of the Cold War and so on. These ethnic, cultural elements in European identity get stronger. And a part of that story, again, I don't want to overstate it, but I think a part of that story is the accession of Central and Eastern European countries which have strengthened those basically civilizational tendencies within the eu.
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C
Well, another part of the story, and you make an interesting point here, and it's one of your core arguments, I think, is that you say, quote, as economic policy has been depoliticized within the eu, political contestation has shifted to issues around identity, immigration and Islam. So can you talk us through that? And is that that was your sort of turning point from 2010 onwards? I guess, yeah.
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And this is part of a much bigger story. Right. So in a way, like with quite a few of these questions that we're discussing, I just kind of touch on these things, but I don't get into huge, huge depth. But there is, I suppose, a sort of, Yeah, a sort of one of the sort of themes in the, in the, in the story I tell about the evolution of the EU in the last, you know, few decades is, you know, has to do with this shift from basically economic questions, you know, being salient in our politics, to cultural questions becoming more salient. And this isn't only a European story. I mean, clearly, for example, in the United States, you know, this is what is referred to in the US as the culture war wars. This has also been a trend elsewhere, but I think there is a particularly European version of this story which has to do with the eu. But I think it forms part of this broader story that's also happening in slightly different forms elsewhere in the context of, I guess, hyper globalization. And I've always thought of European integration as a kind of sort of an extreme form, albeit in a regional context, of hyperglobalization. Because if you think of hyperglobalization or think of globalization rather as the removal of barriers to the movement of capital and goods and people, obviously there are different ways of thinking about globalization. But if you think about it that way, then clearly the EU has gone much further in that direction, albeit within, as I say, this regional context, than the rest of the world has. So you can think of, I think, European integration as being something like hyper regionalization, and then you would expect that it would produce the same backlash as hyper globalization elsewhere is produced, but in a way in a more extreme form directed against the EU itself. That's, I think, roughly the way I think of how the EU fits into this kind of global story. And one of the features, I think, of how. Of that kind of backlash and of hyperglobalization or hyper regionalization and then the backlash against it, it is that basically everywhere. But as I say, in an even more extreme way, in the eu, I think we've had this shift away from economic questions being at the center of our political debates to cultural questions replacing them. And I think, and this is, you know, as I say, it's a much broader argument, and other people have made this argument as well, that a big part of the story is that what happens is that if you take economic. If you take economic policy out of the spatial space of democratic contestation, and as I think that's happened to some extent elsewhere in the world, but it's really happened within the eu, particularly with the creation of the single currency and the fiscal rules and so on, that really have removed economic policy from the space of democratic contestation, then I think it's to some extent inevitable that political contestation shifts to cultural issues. I mean, if you can't argue about the economy and economic policy and real alternative for economic policy anymore, then you're going to end up arguing about culture. And so to put it very simply, there's a way in which neoliberalism produces identity politics. I think if you think of neoliberalism not just in terms of sort of financialization and so on, but in terms of this encasing of economic policy as Quinn Slobodian describes it in his book Globalists, which is another way of, as I say, taking economic policy out of the space of democratic contestation, protecting it from democratic interference, then I think you're going to get identity politics in your democratic politics instead. And I think that's a big part of what's happened in the EU in the last couple of decades. And then in particular, the story I tell in the book is how the refugee crisis in 2015 becomes this kind of turning point where the EU had already thought of itself as being increasingly threatened in the five years or so between the beginning of the euro crisis and the refugee crisis. But then after the refugee crisis increasingly starts to imagine the threats to it in these cultural kind of ways that have to do with identity and immigration and Islam and so on, as the far right gets more powerful in Europe and pushes in this direction, and then centre right parties in particular start to, to mimic them and copy their rhetoric and their policies. So there's this sort of European version, I think, of this broader story of a sort of shift from contestation over economic questions to contestation over cultural questions.
- [35:50]
C
Well, as final question, but it's a big one. I thought there was, reading the book, I thought there was one big missing actor and that was the minority population in the European Union. It's estimated at about 10% of the population. Okay, this a fraction of the minority population in the us but it's still significant. And it particularly jumped out at me when I read your chapter on Brexit and the attitudes of minority voters in the referendum. You make the point that a third of minority voters voted for Brexit. And of course, when I read that, the first thing that jumped into my head, well, that means that two thirds didn't, which is actually larger than the result as a whole. And I actually looked at the polling and also the research you quote from Nima Begum. And while white voters voted to leave by 53 to 47, Asian mixed race voters voted to remain by 67, 33. That went up to 73, 27 for black voters. And what was especially interesting to me in the Begum survey was that essentially people were motivated by the same things. It was the same kind of cohort. Young people who were more professional, better educated, who traveled more in Europe tended to vote Remain, and the people who voted Leave tended to be older people who traveled less in Europe and so on. So again, I wonder whether I agree with so many of the points you make about the history of Europe and even the, you know, the whiteness of representation in Brussels, for example, but there is this minority population that in many ways has similar attitudes on Europe to the white population, but in fact, more so. Yeah, I'd be interested to hear your views on that.
- [37:36]
A
So it's a good question to end on. I'm glad we sort of bringing in the British dimension of this. And by the way, it's interesting because the book only comes out next week, but I'm already starting to have some discussions about it, and I can already sense that, and I slightly expected this, that there would be quite a few people in the UK who would sort of be with me for the first five chapters when I talk about the EU and some of these issues that we've been discussing around the history of the EU and so on. But then in my final chapter on Brexit, I sort of lose them because they wouldn't quite sort of come with me on that final.
- [38:12]
C
You lost me before that. Don't worry.
- [38:14]
A
Okay, okay, okay. So, okay. So on Brexit and on the question of ethnic minorities in the UK and their attitudes to Brexit and to the eu. So look, I mean, first of all, you know, part of what I was trying to do in that last chapter was just to sort of put this issue on the table because, you know, this has essentially been fairly absent from the, you know, the discussions we've had around Brexit in the last seven years or so. You know, and in particular, the, you know, Leave is so associated with the white working class. There's this tendency to sort of forget that. It was actually much more complicated than that. And there were other people who don't belong to the white working class who were. Who were voting for Leave for all kinds of reasons. You're absolutely right. That actually, in a way, the striking thing about the sort of raw numbers of Leave and Remain voters among basically black and Asian. Britain's black and Asian population are pretty similar to the country as a whole. And I do basically agree that the main thing that was driving their votes was actually not their ethnicity. It was the same set of factors that caused other Brits to vote either Leave or Remain. I think I make that Point, point in the book. But I think if you go a little bit further, I, I think there are two things that are quite important. The first is that, you know, and, and this is, I think the first is, is what I think the Nima Bagam research shows. I have, I've, you know, read it perhaps slightly differently than you. I think it shows although many black and Asian voters voted either Leave or remain for the same reasons as white voters did, for some of them at least, there were particular concerns that set them apart from white voters. You know, so in particular, they. Some look at, you know, questions around Islamophobia and the refugee crisis in 2015 in slightly different ways than, certainly than have been attributed to leavers. But secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, I think you have to go beyond the sort of raw numbers in terms of who voted Leave or remain, because as I say, it does roughly, it looks pretty similar to the white population of the uk I think the more interesting question as a way is if you look at the attitudes of black and Asian Brits that did vote to remain, and I'm one of them, by the way. So, you know, again, this is, you know, we've come full circle because this is slightly the personal aspect to this as, as well. For me, I think what's, what's pretty clear and there's lots of research that shows this. But I think also just anecdotally, I think this is very clear and it was clear to, I think, black and Asians long before the Brexit vote happened in 2016, that Black and Asian Brits vote. They identify with Europe even less than white Brits do. So even those that voted remain, it wasn't that they were passionate pro Europeans. Now, obviously I'm generalizing here. Right. Because.
- [41:22]
C
No, that was in the research. You're quite right.
- [41:24]
A
Yeah. So clearly there are some that were right. But broadly, I think the important thing here is that black and Asian Brits just identify with the idea of Europe and the idea of being European much less than white people do in Britain. And this is for exactly the reasons that I outline at the beginning of my book in that personal introduction that you described. There's a way in which the idea of Britishness can absolutely include somebody whose family comes from the Caribbean or from Africa or from the Indian subcontinent. Britishness is quite inclusive, and at least it's become inclusive in that way over the course of, you know, basically during the course of my lifetime, you know, to a large extent as a consequence of the struggles of black and Asian people in Britain to expand the definition.
- [42:13]
C
Of Britishness so that it could include, interestingly, Englishness. Less so. Right, well, Englishness.
- [42:19]
A
Right, exactly. So Englishness is not quite there yet. And this is obviously something that you hear a lot of people say is I can think of myself as British. I struggle to identify as English. I think, I think that's actually changing now as well. But, but you're absolutely right. Britishness has long been perceived by black and Asian Brits as being a more inclusive identity than Englishness. But the crucial point here is, is that it's, it's, it's more inclusive than Europeanness. Right. It's easier for black and Asian Brits to think of themselves as being British for sort of complicated kind of historical reasons than it is for them to think of themselves as being European. And so I guess in a way, what I'm trying to suggest in the book, I didn't quite spell this out, but I'm suggesting that black and Asian Brits intuitively understood something about the EU that most Brits didn't.
- [43:07]
C
To finish as usual, because this is a podcast about books, I've asked my guest to recommend 2. One broadly from their field and one personal choice. So, Hans, what have you chosen?
- [43:18]
A
The first book is one I've actually already mentioned, and it's absolutely central to the issues that I talk about in my book. And it's this book by Pio Hansen and Stefan Johnson called Eurafrica, which came out in 2014. So, as I say, it's almost a decade old now. And, you know, this was transformative for me as part of that process that we discussed of sort of trying to understand the real history of the EU and, and to move beyond that sort of self mythologization of the eu. So this book, Eure Africa, basically is the definitive account of the way in that, that intersection between the sort of, you know, the sort of final period of European colonialism and the, the early period of European integration shows how the two things are interconnected and in particular around this sort of Eurafrica idea, this idea that what European integration was doing was not just integrating nation states, but was actually integrating imperial states. Hugely important book. I'm hugely indebted to Pia Hansen and Stefan Johnson. Absolutely influenced my work. And again, to come back to a point that I made earlier on, what I find absolutely extraordinary is how few people in the policy space have even heard of that book, let alone read it, which they absolutely all should have done. So that's my sort of book that's most closely related to the argument in my book and then my second choice, the more personal choice, which is kind of connected to this and actually connected a little bit to what we were just discussing about Britain. One of my favorite novels is by Sam Selvon. It's called the Lonely Londoners. Came out in I think 1956 and it's basically the first black British novel. Novel. It's about the Windrush generation. Sam Selvon was from Trinidad and he basically describes the lives of. It's very, very short book, very short novel. He basically describes the lives of this first generation of mainly Caribbean men, young men that came to Britain in the 1950s. And I love it partly because it's set in the part of West London that I live in. And so it gives these incred picture of what, of what Labrador Grove and these places, places around here were like at that time. But it also, it just really captures the, as I say, the lives of that first generation of people that you can see in retrospect really transformed Britain. But at the time, the way they experienced it was as this, you know, day to day struggle to kind of, to kind of live and survive basically. It's very moving, very, very funny as well. And it's one of my favorite novels.
- [46:16]
C
Great. Well, they're both new to the tip sheet, so thanks for that. Today I've been talking to Hans Gunnarny about Euro Whiteness, published by Hearst on August 17th. Hans, thanks again for coming on.
- [46:28]
A
Thank you so much for having me. It's been great fun talking to you.