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Syracuse University’s Center for European Studies at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs welcomed Hans Kundnani, a current visiting fellow at New York University’s Remarque Institute, Wednesday evening for a discussion of his new book: “Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project.”

Kundnani’s book sets forth an argument about the European Union — which, he said, is interchangeable with Europe — and European identity. He said his argument is “quite different” than the histories that the EU “tells about itself” and that European studies tell about European expression.

“European identity and the (EU) has a lot more to do with whiteness than we think,” he said. “I think there’s a European history of whiteness (separate from Anglo American history) and it’s a real gap. My book doesn’t really fill it, but it’s trying to sort of say, ‘Look, we need to think about the history of whiteness in the European context.’”

The origin of the EU was European integration, a “colonial project” that began in the 1950s. It was a way for France and Belgium to hold onto their remaining colonies in West and Central Africa, Kundnani said. He said he calls European integration “the original sin of European exploration,” in analogy to “the role of slavery in the founding of the United States.” He does not mean to suggest that this is the whole story, but said it is an important part that has been “written out (of history) until very recently.”

Kundnani, who studied philosophy and German at Oxford University and journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, was previously the director of the Europe Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, commonly known as the Chatham House, in London — an international affairs think tank.

Prior to his time at Chatham House, Kundnani was a full-time journalist. He continues to write for several newspapers, including The Guardian, and has written for various other newspapers and magazines like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He has also written books such as “Utopia or Auschwitz” and “The Paradox of German Power.”

Kundnani said that the EU thinks about itself based upon what he calls “internal lessons” — lessons learned from centuries of conflict between Europeans that ultimately led to World War II and the Holocaust.

“But what is missing is any sense of what I call the ‘external lessons’ of European history,” Kundnani said. “Not so much of what Europeans have done to each other, but what they’ve done to the rest of the world … in particular, Africa and the Middle East … obviously, European colonialism.”

Kundnani said he doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that this “forgetting” takes place within European history, and that European integration granted Europeans “an escape from the memory of empire.” When he speaks in Europe, he said people often try to avoid conversations about race, especially whiteness.

Kundnani has spent the last 15 years or so working at a series of foreign policy think tanks similar to Chatham House, he said. Initially, he thought of himself as “pro-European.” Now, he considers himself a “eurosceptic” — which Oxford Reference defines as a person who is “sceptical of the European Union and European integration” — because he can imagine a “completely” different EU.

“I think, beyond a certain point, if your vision for the EU is so different from the current one that what it would involve doing to make it a reality is unwinding a lot of the existing steps in European integration to then be able to create something new … it becomes a bit perverse to say ‘No, but I’m pro-European too,’” Kundnani said.

Kundnani said his former boss at the European Council on Foreign Relations wrote a book called “Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century.” There are, at least, two problematic things about this potential form of global governance, he said.

“It leads, it seems to me, to a revival of the idea of a European civilizing mission — mission civilisatrice,” Kundnani said. “It’s one of the long continuities in this long story of European identity … this idea that we are civilizing the world.”

Anthony Ornelaz, a student in SU’s master’s program for creative writing and a Tillman Scholar, attended the event for his European Integration class taught by Glyn Morgan, the director of the Center for European Studies and associate professor in the political science department.

“I think it’s an important topic given the fact that Europe and America’s connection is vastly, dynamically changing,” Ornelaz said.

Kundnani closed his book with a chapter on Britain. His father is Indian and his mother is Dutch, and they both came to Britain in the 1960s, he said. It was much easier for his father to come to Britain from India than it was for his mother to come from the Netherlands, he said.

His mother, a woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, felt like an outsider in British society. This has to do with a “very particular history” of the British Empire, wherein Commonwealth citizens — those from Britain’s former colonies, including Caribbean countries and India — were considered British citizens.

“They didn’t come to Britain as immigrants,” he said. “We’ve retrospectively reimagined them as immigrants, but actually there were citizens moving from one part of the Commonwealth to another.”

The balance between the Commonwealth and Britain’s former colonies has “completely reversed” in the course of Kundnani’s lifetime. It has become much easier for people from Europe to live in Britain, and much more difficult for people from Britain’s former colonies, he said.

“Is there not an opportunity for Britain and Brexit to reinvent its identity in a less Eurocentric way? To go back to this history and deepen our relationship with our former colonies — perhaps as part of a project of reparations — to deepen our engagement with our own colonial past?” Kundnani asked. “Rather than being an expression of white anger, it’s sort of almost the opposite. There’s a certain kind of, I think, anti-racist potential.”

Published on February 29, 2024 at 12:34 am

Contact Ahna: arflemin@syr.edu