Race, racialisation, and the East of the European Union: an introduction

ABSTRACT

Racial capitalism requires that the subaltern periphery, providing cheap labour and new markets, be placed behind an imagined racial barrier, so that the full protection of the liberal state is not extended to it. This has applied also to the ‘Eastern enlargement’ of the EU. The East has had to compete with a much richer and more powerful West. When, inevitably, the East was unable to ‘catch up’, its ‘failure’ was attributed to its alleged historical and cultural incompatibility with the West. Such racist discourse has penetrated global and European politics, economics, and media. It also affects people who move from the East to the West. Unfortunately, many Eastern Europeans project their own racialisation onto others. This dynamic is articulated from the equivocal position of Eastern Europe, between the core West and the Global South. It aims to affirm the threatened whiteness of people in the region by distancing them from the Global South. But also, it functions within Eastern Europe, with each country to the East imagined as more ‘Eastern European’ until one reaches the prototypical Eastern European nation, Russia. For racism against Eastern Europeans reflects, in the final analysis, the long-standing imperial rivalry between the West and Russia.

KEYWORDS:

• racialisation
• racial capitalism
• Central Europe
• Russia
• Ukraine

The production of racialised Others is a process that is inherent to capitalism. The rationale for this Special Issue is the recognition that one such Other is the ‘Eastern European’. Racial privilege, in the concrete historical circumstances of global capitalism, is white privilege. But white privilege is not given to all white people in equal measure. The divisive logic of capitalism works also within white groups and is accompanied by racism towards less privileged Whites.¹ This includes racism against Eastern Europeans. Following earlier contributions by scholars such as Anikó Imre (2005, see also Imre, 2023) and Manuela Boatcă (2006), many researchers are currently turning their attention to the intersections between race, whiteness, and Eastern Europe. This Special Issue presents work by some of the leading scholars dedicated to this emerging and complex field.²

Racism against Eastern Europeans originates from wider, global and historically rooted mechanisms of capital accumulation. Colonial exploitation and its postcolonial continuities are chief among these. Links between the postsocialist and the postcolonial condition are therefore increasingly of interest to scholars and provide an important framework for our study of racialisation.

The parallels between the postsocialist and the postcolonial condition have been noticed not only by scholars, but also by the general public in Eastern Europe, and this includes the leaders of the illiberal reaction that has gathered force in the area. But, instead of solidarity with the postcolonial Global South, such leaders have opted to emphasise their European identity and Christian heritage, and to distance themselves as much as possible from the postcolonial world and the people, many of them Muslim, who move to Europe from there. In this rhetoric, Europeanness and Christianity have been robbed of almost any positive content other than white superiority and supremacy. Some Eastern Europeans choose, in other words, to affirm their threatened whiteness through racism against others. On this unfortunate pattern, racism against Eastern Europeans is connected to racism by Eastern Europeans.

The emerging literature on the topic may be divided into that which deals with people living in Eastern Europe, and that which deals with people moving from there to the West. One of the objectives of the Special Issue is to span this divide. The article by co-guest-editor Aleksandra Lewicki (2023), in particular, offers ways to include the geopolitical and the migration aspect of race and racialisation in the same conceptual framework.

I begin this Introduction by debating the characteristics of racial capitalism and how they impact people in or from the East of the European Union. I discuss how racial capitalism produces racism against Eastern Europeans, but also racism by Eastern Europeans towards others. And I end with a discussion of how racism against Eastern Europeans is incorporated by Eastern Europeans themselves. Each nation imagines itself as more western and less Eastern European than its neighbours to the East, whom it deems to be more like the prototypical Eastern European nation, Russia. This suggests that racism against Eastern Europeans is the result, in part, of a long-standing imperial rivalry between the West and Russia.

Racial capitalism

The term ‘racial capitalism’, coined by Cedric Robinson (2019 [1989]), does not refer, as the phrase ‘racial capitalism’ may suggest, to a specific form of capitalism, but rather to one of its enduring and defining aspects. The notion of racial capitalism has long roots, going from Stuart Hall all the way to at least Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of colonialism. Luxemburg recognised during the very heyday of the colonial period that colonised populations were not given the rights granted to those in the colonial metropole (Luxemburg 2003, 332–333). Since the earliest period of colonialism, capitalism has always depended on ‘sorting out’ (Heng 2018) racialised populations to fulfil various functions for the benefit of the world system dominated by the colonisers. Such a racialised sorting out occurred also when, after the fall of communism, Western capital achieved an overwhelming presence in postsocialist Central Europe.

It may be unusual, perhaps provocative, to speak of racism by white people against white people. But it is fairly well agreed today that the first manifestations of modern racism targeted groups who were not defined by skin colour. Religion was more important. According to Geraldine Heng (2018), the first ‘racial state’ was thirteenth-century England, whence Jews were expelled after being first excluded from the rest of society and robbed of their property. Other scholars date the origins of racism to similar processes in Spain and Portugal, most spectacularly the expulsion, decreed in Spain in 1492, of those Jews who would not submit to baptism. Muslims were also forced to convert. For generations, even ‘New Christians’, defined as those who inherited the ‘blood’ (Anidjar 2014) of Jews or Muslims, would be barred from certain forms of property and/or employment. As the Americas were incorporated into European colonial structures, Walter Mignolo (2006, 18), argues, such racism enabled the rise of the ‘racial colonial matrix whose logic is still at work today’, that is to say, racial capitalism, and its association of capital accumulation with whiteness. This did not mean that henceforth racism would no longer be directed also at people who were phenotypically white. In fact, Mignolo (2021, 114) suggests that with the colonial ascendancy of Protestant Northern Europe, Europe’s South was invented as a distinct area, and Spaniards themselves were racialised.

When the racialising logic of early capitalism was transferred from Europe to the Americas, it continued to attach to divisions of labour that did not necessarily function along colour lines. At first, when plantations were being established in Virginia, Irish and African workers were exploited in comparable ways (Allen 1994), and even found cause to unite to further their interests (Rice 2012). Moreover, this was a time when agricultural labour in Europe itself was not necessarily ‘free’. The economic connection between the labour of enslaved people in the Americas, including the Caribbean, and enserfed people in Eastern Europe, both unfree producers of grain for the global market, has been explored by Manuela Boatcă (2013).

Based on Allen’s work, Noel Ignatiev (2009) showed, however, that eventually the Irish ‘became white’ in America, gaining white privilege at the expense of buying into racial discrimination against Blacks. Something like that also occurred in the case of other peripheralised European peoples, as shown by the titles of works like How Jews Became White Folks (Brodkin 1998), How French Canadians Became White Folks (Scott 2016), or How Mennonites Became White (Gollner 2016).

It is really white privilege, not whiteness as such, that is at play here. Work on Irish immigrants ‘becoming white’ in America, or Jews or French-Canadians, deals with groups who were actually already ‘white’ by their own account and that of everyone else. So were the Iberians racialised by the Protestant colonisers. As a figure of speech, ‘becoming white’ may actually obscure the very point it wants to reveal, namely, that white privilege is an object of negotiation and struggle, but is nevertheless granted to some extent to all, or almost all, white people. The Irish-American case demonstrates, at the same time, that Irish immigrants were excluded from full white privilege (for example on the job market), and also that they acquired a position of relative privilege not available to Blacks (Ignatiev 2009). The Irish did not really need to ‘become white’, but did struggle, successfully, to become more white. The issue here is not the difference between white and not-white people, but between Whites who access full white privilege and those who do not, people whom József Böröcz (2021; see also Zarycki 2022) has discussed as ‘dirty white’.

Eastern Europeanism: racism against Eastern Europeans

Since the incorporation of postsocialist Europe into the global capitalist system, Eastern Europeans have become not more, but less white. During the Brexit debate and since, scholars have identified verbal and even physical attacks on Eastern Europeans as a form of racist violence. These scholars include Alina Rzepnikowska (2019), whose article in this Special Issue further explores the matter, also covering the experiences of movers from Eastern Europe to Spain (see also Samaluk 2016; Fox and Mogilnicka 2019; Favell 2021).

Elsewhere (Kalmar 2018a; 2018b; 2019; 2022) I have called racism against Eastern Europeans, ‘Eastern Europeanism’. Among the worst manifestations of Eastern Europeanism may be the death of Jozef Chovanec, which occurred in Belgium in 2018. Chovanec was a traveller from Slovakia who had boarded a budget flight at Charleroi Airport. The 39-year old suffered from episodes of mental illness, and it was reported later that he became violent before take-off. Police placed him in a cell, where video showed a policewoman making a mock Nazi salute as other officers smiled in amusement. One officer knelt on the Slovak’s chest for about 16 minutes.

It is hardly surprising that Chovanec’s wife Henrieta sees a parallel to the 2020 murder of the African American, George Floyd (BBC News 2020), by a policeman who choked him to death. But, as Lewicki (in this SI) suggests, it is problematic to compare experiences of racialisation from one group to another. It would be wrong to suggest that racism against white workers anywhere in Europe is as dehumanising or as systematic as racism against people of colour. It would be obscene to equate the brutal racism towards Black Europeans, African Americans, indigenous people and other people of colour, to Western racism against white Eastern Europeans. (A closer comparison could be made to Eastern European racism against the Roma; see, e.g. van Baar 2021).

Even less fortunate white people generally enjoy some of the fruits of local and global white privilege. In spite of its peripheral position in the EU, its eastern flank still enjoys the overall prosperity of the region, which is due in large measure to its deeply unequal relationship with the Global South (Hickel et al. 2022). Eastern European citizens of the EU, too, can freely move without official impediments to the core areas of European capitalism, where opportunities exceed those in their home country. Non-Europeans may need to risk their lives boarding make-shift boats to cross the Mediterranean. If rich, they may be able to purchase European residents’ rights, and so find their place within Europe’s still White-dominated economic system (Boatcă 2022, 104). Evidently, it is worth a lot of money to gain the rights that are automatically extended in the EU to Eastern, as much as Western, Europeans. Even so, money cannot buy the privilege possessed by movers from the East of Europe as opposed to people of colour from outside, to see their children, if not themselves, potentially able to ‘pass’ into the generic ‘White’ category and so to acquire full or nearly full white privilege.

The chief reason for calling prejudice, discrimination, and demeaning discourses about Eastern Europeans a form of racism is not to equate it with more severe racisms, but to locate it in the same generative mechanism of exclusionary capital accumulation that characterises racial capitalism. Employing the notion of race in this manner may also challenge an entrenched attitude that denies the relevance of race to understanding Europe. Many Europeans make a distinction between ‘race’ (based on skin colour) and ‘nation’, and consider these to be self-evident, natural categories of descent-based distinction. As the African-American historian Thomas C. Holt (2000, 17) puts it with irony, ‘Race is something Blacks have; ethnicity belongs to Whites’. While the extension of the term ‘race’ may provoke initial resentment, it can also shake those certainties that promote the denial of the role of race in Europe, East or West, and reveal it as a self-serving mechanism, masking white privilege.

At any rate, just about every Eastern European knows how it feels to be, if not attacked, then dismissed or demeaned by Western white people. Complaints of ill-treatment in the West by movers from Central Europe are extensive. As one widely reproduced tweet put it, ‘All I have to say about the “Eastern Europeans are white people readily embraced by the West” debate is that people saying this have clearly never been immigrants from Eastern Europe to the West’.³ Evidence of discrimination appears to be quite serious not only in working and lower-middle-calls work settings, but also in academia. Academics from Central Europe are underrepresented in Western publications and on Western faculties. A striking example is that of the former East Germany, where an overwhelming number of professors was replaced with Western Germans almost as soon as the GDR was absorbed by federal Germany (Bluhm and Jakobs 2016).

While Eastern Europeanism must be carefully distinguished from racism against people of colour, it can and should be compared to racism against other white people who do not enjoy full white privilege. Today, in every core White-majority country such as the United States, England, or France, there are groups of white people who have not enjoyed the prosperity achieved by some during the triumphant period of neoliberal globalisation in the nineties. The less educated and those living in rural areas, for example, though white, look on from the outside at the glamour of the major ‘world cities’.

In Eastern Europe, too, a few stylish neighbourhoods in Warsaw or Budapest have come to enjoy the good life. But as the socialist factory and agricultural system collapsed, large numbers of people got jobs in the assembly shops established by Western and Asian companies or toiled in precarious positions with decreased social benefits. Eastern Europe remains a white periphery, comparable, mutatis mutandis, to the depopulating countryside and the rustbelts of the West.

The process of peripheralisation that targets all these areas frames racism against people who live there and also who move from there. In this Special Issue, Aleksandra Lewicki (2023) includes among the factors that support the racialisation of movers from the East to the core West, the politics of austerity, the precarisation of labour, the fortification of borders, and even public health measures against infectious disease. These are, however, not the first causes of racism, but rather attach fundamentally to the peripheralisation of the East of the EU:

The racialization of ‘Eastern Europeans’ is not a product of 21st century mobilities – rather, it reflects and reproduces the peripheralization of the region. Notably, it is the peripheralization of Europe’s East that has channelled East–West mobilities in the first place; the political-legal conditioning of these mobilities, in turn, further contributes to peripheralizing the region. People from the EU’s East face structural disadvantages after migration – however, normalized precarious labour mobility also has longer term political-economic effects on Europe’s East.

Racial capitalism and the alliance between the very rich and the not-so-poor

It is not only labour that is affected by the racialisation of Eastern Europe. The imperative to restrict Eastern Europe to cheap labour and captive markets, so that capital can be accumulated in the West, also acts against competition from Eastern European capitalists, who wish to accumulate capital in their home area (and/or to take part as equals in the accumulation of capital in the West). As in the postcolony, the scarcity of local capital in Eastern Europe meant that when the region joined the global capitalist system it had to acquire investment from the richer West. That led to Western ownership of the means of production, and/or the necessary dependence of those who do possess or acquire capital locally on much more powerful, Western-dominated networks. An elite developed, educated in the West or in Western style and who function within the local economic and other (educational and cultural) networks that are relatively well integrated with the dominant West. Immediately after the end of communist rule, some of these Western-oriented elites stemmed not only from the ‘dissidents’ opposed to the communist regimes, but also, and importantly, from reform-minded elements within or associated with the Party. James Mark et al. (2019) have shown how ‘1989’ was not as much the direct result of either grassroots rebellion or Western influence, as of the abandonment of the socialist model by the elites, already, under the communist governments. These groups prefigured the Western-oriented elites of today, who include younger people fluent in English and familiar with Western big-city life styles. In the Czech Republic, the far right calls them sluníčkáři or ‘sunshine people’, and the president, Miloš Zeman, ridicules them as ‘the Prague café’ (Joch 2014).

It is not the ‘sunshine people’ who provide the irritant to Western interests or the target for racialising tropes of ‘Eastern European’ difference, but a group that some political economists have called the ‘national bourgeoisie’ or ‘national capitalists’ (Gagyi 2016; Fabry 2019; Scheiring 2020; Schank 2009). Most of these scholars focus on Hungary, but their conclusions are generalisable to much of the global semi-periphery. They show that the injection of foreign capital and privatisations were sufficient to favour some capital accumulation and independent business activity by local individuals and companies. These continue to depend on Western investment and cannot afford to oppose it in any comprehensive and radical way. Yet their interests cross to a considerable extent with those of the Western corporations and their local associates.

In this context, Western capital’s irritation with its eastern competition is joined, perversely, to Western labour’s long-standing grievance against being undercut by foreign labour. Conservative political forces associated with capital build alliances with some workers around these complaints. The results are the significant restrictions on freedom of movement for circular workers from the East of the EU that are discussed by Lewicki (2023) in this issue (Lewicki also surveys the relevant literature, including Barbulescu and Favell 2020). These cater to the feelings of dissatisfaction from segments of labour that have been channelled into racist rhetoric against ‘Eastern Europeans’ and politically exploited. Such labour-oriented anti-migrant discourse allies with capital-oriented racism, using similar racialising tropes. Eastern workers have been portrayed as criminally inclined ‘gangsters’ of the same low moral fibre as the ‘oligarchs’ who employ them in their home countries.

Ironically, this very same logic of an alliance between some of the very rich and some of the not-so-poor has been reproduced in the East of the EU itself. Local capital wants protection against more powerful foreigners. Labour wants to be protected in the race to the bottom of labour costs, from competition by workers in or from the Global South. The illiberal demands on the state in the West and in the East of Europe are a mirror image of the other; one cannot be considered in isolation from the other (Kalmar 2022, Chapter 8).

Outsourcing guilt to the East

The need to consider the East of Europe not in isolation but together with the West applies also to the alleged inclination of White Eastern Europeans, to discrimination and prejudice against others. Racism against the Roma is without a doubt the most pervasive and pernicious form of racism that afflicts the East of the EU (see, for example, van Baar 2012; 2021), but it does also exist in the West. Islamophobia in the area became politically important during the ‘migration crisis’ of 2015–2016 (Kalmar 2018a; 2018b; 2019; Kalmar and Shoshan 2020). But the Islamophobic comments that were used there were the same in form as those heard all over Western Europe or America (prominently by President Donald Trump).

Hostility to Muslims has been widely attributed to a tradition of antisemitism, seen as the prototypical racism, and understood as having particularly strong roots in Eastern Europe and not having been sufficiently addressed there (see, for example, Gross 2015). But such assumptions are open to challenge (Kalmar 2022, chapter 6). Although racism, against the Roma, against Jews, against Muslims, and against people of colour afflicts much of the East of the EU, to locate it as a distinctively Eastern problem is questionable on two different counts: first, it tends to deny its existence in the West, and second, it supports that denial by projecting the problem eastward as if racism were more compatible with being an Eastern than a Western European. This projection of racism eastward by the West (Boatcă 2007, 373; Kalmar 2011, 12; 2019, 21; Lewicki and Shooman 2020) is the symmetrical opposite of the East’s westward projection of responsibility for the historical sins of white privilege. It is addressed specifically by Anikó Imre and Kasia Narkowicz in this volume. The displacement of racism to the East by a racist West is part of the work done by Eastern Europeanism, similarly to Orientalism, of which it may be considered a part (Todorova 2009), to make the East ‘a repository of negative characteristics against which a positive and self-congratulatory image of Europe and the “West” has been constructed’ (Boatcă 2022, 106).

It is true that the alliance of ‘national’ capital and parts of labour has at the time of writing been more successful in the East of the EU than the West. It is also true that although this illiberal alliance uses the same racist tropes as its western parallels, it often does so more boldly and to a wider audience. This is not due to cultural predisposition. Rather, it reflects a misguided revolt against the area’s marginalisation in conditions of racial capitalism.

It is also due to the fact that, because white majorities in the East of the EU are overwhelming and organisation by the one significant racial minority, the Roma, is weak, political mobilisation against white racism largely relies in Eastern Europe on the goodwill of white people, acting without much pressure activists and voters of colour, who may be personally affected by white racism. Once the number of migrants of colour increases in the East of the EU, which is inevitable given that most of it belongs to the free-movement Schengen zone, they may be expected to pose organised resistance to local racism, as they do in the West. How even a small number of local people of colour can successfully agitate for difference is shown, in this SI, by Balogun and Pędziwiatr (2023). Four Polish women of colour posted a video in protest of being called murzyn, a term for black people derived from ‘Moor’ (the mediaeval term used to label North Africans) and which the authors compare to ‘Negro’. The women succeeded in sensitising the Polish public, for the first time perhaps, to racism ingrained in the Polish as in other European languages. Following nation-wide debate, the official Polish body advising on language use decreed that murzyn should be avoided in the media, government bodies, and schools.

The East of Europe and the Global South

The point here is not to engage in finger pointing at either East or West as culturally or historically predisposed to racism, but to understand race and racialisation in Europe in continental, indeed global terms. In this respect, parallels between postsocialist Eastern Europe and the postcolonial Global South are of particular interest. Analogies between the two have, after the fall of the communist regimes, at first been made by scholars in the sense of the region being a ‘colony’ of the Soviet empire. Meeting some of them in 2005, one of the founders of postcolonial studies, Gayatri Spivak, agreed that they were right to consider their subjugation by the USSR to have been colonial (Chernetsky et al. 2006, 829). By then, however, József Böröcz (2001), had identified the colonial analogy as applicable to the new version of exploitation of Eastern Europe, by the West. Later, Böröcz also recognised the racial aspects of this development (see also Böröcz and Sarkar 2017; Böröcz 2021).

Recognising parallels between the postsocialist and the postcolonial situation does not mean ignoring the differences. A number of articles in this Special Issue (Imre, Krivonos, Lewicki, Narkowicz) emphasise Eastern Europe’s position in the global structures of privilege and power, somewhere in between the privileged core of Northwestern Europe and the postcolonial periphery. Immanuel Wallerstein’s notion of the semi-periphery, ‘a peripheral zone for core countries’ that is also ‘a core country for some peripheral areas’ (1976, 463), in a world system of economic and geopolitical inequality, has been revived recently by several scholars of Eastern Europe (see, for example, Shields 2009; Boschi and Santana 2012; Bobako 2018).

Eastern Europe, like other semi-peripheries, does not occupy a static position between the core and periphery, but rather a changing function whose role continues to be in part to permit the entire edifice of the capitalist world system to operate, by protecting it from extreme polarisation (Boatcă 2022). The semi-periphery allows inequality to be diffused to some extent across the system, reproducing and so strengthening it. The mediation works in complex ways, with various populations playing different and changing roles in the construction of the world core–periphery system. Anna Parvulescu (2016) writes about how race functions in Europe – in the global context including migration from the postcolony – as an ongoing ‘racial triangulation’ (Kim 2000) among Western and Eastern White Europeans and Black Europeans. This approach is taken in this SI by Daria Krivonos (2023), who examines its functioning down into interpersonal relations on the ground.

Has Eastern Europe’s location between the global core and periphery, between the rich and the poorest, between the colonisers and the colonised, helped Eastern Europeans within the EU to develop an awareness of global exploitation and foster solidarity with the Global South? James Mark et al. (2019) delve in detail into the cooperation and mutual influence between communist-ruled Eastern Europe and the decolonising ‘Third World’. They consider how, in the last stages of state socialism, elite technocrats sought models for the future in Latin America and China. Elsewhere, Mark and Betts (2022) show how during the communist era Eastern Europeans felt that their ‘commitment to an anti-colonial internationalism had rendered them the better kind of white’. Madina Tlostanova (2018) noted that in reality the Soviet Union’s patronising discourse of anti-colonial solidarity barely hid notions of Russian white superiority.

After the fall of communism, some people took their pre-existing attitudes with them when moving to the West, where they were reinforced by local racism. Magdalena Nowicka (2018:, 825) shows how Polish migrants to the United Kingdom ‘incorporate, reproduce, and transform aspects of racial discourses present in the British public space into their cultural repertoire (habitus)’. Fox and Mogilnicka (2019) have shown how movers from Eastern Europe who are subject to racism in the UK can assert their whiteness by assimilating racist attitudes to people of colour. Emma Dabiri (2021, 72–73) has asked when discussing the position of those who find themselves disadvantaged by systemic racism but know that others are even more so: ‘Do we want to get to the top of the deck or do we want to destroy the god-damn ship?’ Some Eastern Europeans want to get to the top of the system of white privilege, not to wreck it.⁴

Furthermore, the strategy of White so-called conservative nationalists throughout Europe (and the world) is to claim that the ship needs to be repaired after damage caused by ‘liberals’. To make Europe and the West great again as the preserve of the white, patriarchal, heteronormative, Christian family, is the declared goal of the illiberal movement in East Central Europe. Applebaum (2020) labels this attitude ‘restorative nostalgia’. It illustrates the suggestion by Salman Sayyid (2018, 427), who argued in his discussion of Islamophobia that ‘The significance of East Central Europe arises from the way in which these countries are both vulnerable in their Europeanness and the most strident in their claims for it’.

However, although many observers associate ‘Eastern Europe’ with racism, others, including in the East of the EU itself, disavow racism as irrelevant to their national communities, which they assume, falsely, to be homogenously white with no experience with colonial or postcolonial populations. Anikó Imre alludes, in her study of fantasy genre film productions in Eastern Europe (in this SI), to a paradox that is at play here. Eastern Europe functions as a destination towards which white guilt over white racism can be deflected. At the same time, thought of as a purely white region, Eastern Europe itself is imagined as a world in which white people do not have to worry about guilt, because race is simply not an issue there at all. One may discern here two aspects of ‘white innocence’ (Wekker 2016), the notion of a guiltless White West. The liberal approach is to project racism onto the East. The right-wing racist is to see it as the ideal White Europe (see also Shekhovtsov 2017).

The similarities of the postsocialist condition to the postcolonial have not escaped the illiberal right, whose use of it, predictably, is the exact opposite of solidarity. Addressing an enthusiastic crowd of over 100,000 in Budapest, in the spring of 2012, Viktor Orbán cried, ‘We will not be a colony!’. ‘We will not live according to the commands of foreign powers’, he added, as if to define what ‘colony’ means on his crudely simplified view of the matter. Since then, it has become a constant refrain throughout Central Europe (Kalmar 2022, chapters 8–9; Ginelli 2022). The particular Central European form of white innocence includes the contention that Central Europeans need not feel responsible for the fate of people of colour exposed to racism, or for the plight of people from the ex-colonies who seek refuge in Europe (Sayyid 2018, Imre 2023). Ignoring the benefits that all White populations have enjoyed in the global system of coloniality (these are surveyed by Narkowicz 2023; see also Balogun 2022), the illiberal right claims that they need not feel guilty about the exploitation of the Global South because they did not participate in it.

The absurdities of this rhetoric became particularly clear during the 2021 football season when some Eastern EU players were accused of racism. In response, the ‘we were never colonisers’ trope was heard in the highest places. After a friendly football match between Ireland and Hungary where the Irish knelt in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Hungarians did not, none less than Viktor Orbán – a major football fan – called the Irish action a ‘provocation’. He insisted that Hungary, unlike the West, did not carry the moral burden of having been responsible or slavery. ‘We as Hungarians do not see this burden, (…) In the carrying of these burdens, we, who were not slave-owners, cannot help them [the Western countries where the kneeling demonstration began].’

The Czech political scientist Pavel Barša (2020; see also Slačálek 2016, 40) notes how the desire to become fully accepted (in our terms, to be fully White – to be granted the full extent of white privilege), has precluded solidarity in postsocialist societies with postcolonial ones, including even among the much-celebrated ‘dissidents’ who had fought for democracy under communism and temporarily took over the reins of government after the end of communist rule:

Central Europeans were returning to ‘their’ Western civilization, which by the fact of their return proved that it was the centre of the world. (…) the imperative of assimilating to Western norms and accepting neoliberalism was often justified by the contention that they were a necessary condition to ensure that we didn’t fall to the level of a ‘developing country’. The erstwhile ‘second’ world was to be split between those who would succeed in joining the ‘first’ and those who, declassed, are become part of the ‘third’. The premier task of Central European nations was to acquire a place in the first group and, at all costs, prevent possible demotion to the third.

Central Europeans attempt to differentiate themselves from other Eastern Europeans in order to affirm their insecure credentials as civilised Westerners, that is as full Whites, by demonstrating their will and ability to institute a ‘free market’. This may even have been the unspoken rationale for organising the Visegrád Alliance of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary in 1991 (Červinková, Buchowski, and Uherek 2015).

Central vs. Eastern Europe

The semi-peripheral position of Eastern Europe between the West and the Global South nests within it another in-betweenness: that between the West and Russia. While this is obvious in an immediate sense, the use of the phrase ‘Central and Eastern Europe’, typically in an unexamined, undifferentiated way, by academics and journalists indicates an unwillingness to trouble the implication that Central Europe is not only different from the West, but also from the prototypical Eastern European nation, Russia.

Equating Central with Eastern Europe is not an innocent exercise. It is itself a cornerstone of Eastern Europeanist racism, which, as all other racisms, flattens differences among its target population. Eastern Europeanism is among other things a tool wielded by the victorious West to change the entire Soviet empire, after 1989, into an economic colony. ‘A second-rate empire, in the imaginaries of the winning rivals, is regarded as a colony’, as Madina Tlostanova (2019, 170) writes. Russia’s national bourgeoisie and political kleptocracy successfully resisted integration into the Western hegemony, and so Russia is once again the rival empire it has been for centuries. But the part of the former Soviet empire that acceded to the EU was not able (and at first not willing) to resist subordination to the core West. Eastern Europeanism justifies the area’s status as the subaltern that Russia was also meant to be, reflecting the original logic of racial capitalism’s extension beyond the fallen Berlin Wall.

Troubling the equation of Central with Eastern Europe is not to deny the common fate that Central and Eastern Europe have shared in various periods, including the period of communist socialism with its continuing aftereffects. Central Europe has always experienced inter-imperiality quite strongly, due to its proximity to the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Nevertheless, in the long durée and with the exception of the socialist period, in terms of the existential-dialectical concept of vying empires proposed by Laura Doyle (2020), most of Central Europe was for most of its history more a part of Western, rather than Russian or Ottoman vectors of imperiality. This is true again today.

That the geographic and cultural definition of these two terms, Central and Eastern Europe, remains uncertain is crucial to the dynamic that opposes them to one another. This is forcefully revealed in the case of Ukraine, especially after its invasion by Russia. The countries most commonly and by general consensus referred to as ‘Central Europe’ include Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. It is also common to call ‘Central Europe’ all or most of the postsocialist East of the European Union. It is less common, although not completely unusual, to refer to Ukraine as Central European. Being referred to as Central rather than Eastern European has ideological content. In the case of the Balkans, the claim to be Central European moves countries westward in the European mind, and away from the Turkish/Ottoman Orient (Boatcă 2006). In the case of Ukraine, it moves the country to Europe’s Western core and away from Russia. This is the meaning today of the frequent references by Ukrainian leaders to their position in the ‘middle’ of Europe.

Such references include President Zelensky’s declaration that Ukraine is ‘the heart of Europe’ (Chance and CNN 2022). Not enough in the heart, though, to counter the longstanding foot-dragging of NATO and the EU on accepting Ukraine into the alliance, even though NATO membership might have saved it from the Russian invasion. In contrast, when, in reaction to the invasion, Finland and Sweden decided to join NATO, they were welcomed with no hesitation.⁵

It is worth wondering to what extent French president Macron, who cautioned Ukraine that it wouldn’t be admitted into the EU for decades (BBC News 2022), was motivated by his regrets of having earlier admitted other Eastern Europeans. But they were admitted with relatively little debate – although Romania and Bulgaria had to wait for a longer, arguably because they like Ukraine are, along with Russia, on the wrong side of the ancient Great Schism, in Christianity, between the Latin West and the Orthodox East.⁶ There is clearly, and has long been, a graduated Eastern Europeanism, adopted by Eastern Europeans themselves, which proceeds in a roughly eastern direction. It begins in Germany, where some Western Germans apply Eastern Europeanist prejudice to Eastern Germans (Kalmar and Shoshan 2020), who then apply it to Czechs, as do Czechs to Slovaks, Slovaks to Ukrainians, Western Ukrainians to Eastern Ukrainians, and many Ukrainians, finally, to Russians. The complexities that this creates for migrants from Russia and Ukraine to countries west of them, ‘Western European’ Finland but also ‘Eastern European’ Poland (a major destination for Ukrainians where in spite of an enthusiastic welcome for refugees hate crimes have also been reported⁷), are discussed in this SI by Daria Krivonos.

Russia appears as the classic eastern nation in the imagined civilisational hierarchy just mentioned, the giant in whose image the little-known countries of its European neighbourhood are created in the Western, Eastern Europeanist stereotype. That this remains so decades after the end of the Cold War is indicative of the geopolitical situation, perpetuating centuries of rivalry between Russian and Western imperiality⁸ (though the two have also joined sometimes in their pursuit of colonial and postcolonial domination). It is also, and within the context of that imperial rivalry, a symptom of the West’s need to treat the East of the EU as an exploitable Other, according to the logic of racial capitalism. Some illiberal Central Europeans like Viktor Orbán attempt to exploit their inter-imperial position to gain a degree of independence. Most will rally for the temporary unity of Western and Central Europe, which arises periodically at times of Russian threat. One can only hope that in the long run this serves to strengthen democracy and not the hopeless struggle, doomed because of the inherent discriminations of racial capitalism, for Eastern Europeans to be at last recognised as fully white.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author’s work is supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

1 I use the terms ‘White(s)’ and ‘Black(s)’ to designate groups so labeled in everyday English. These terms, like the groupings they designate, are socially constructed, and are not based on any precise criteria. In spite, and indeed because, of their constructedness and imprecision, they are of decisive importance in the production of inequality. I capitalise the nouns ‘White’ and ‘Black’, following Appiah (2020), who notes that natural categories are not capitalised, but socially constructed collective identities are. Nevertheless, in keeping with almost universal practice I keep ‘black’ and ‘white’ lower-case when they function as adjectives, as in ‘black groups’ or ‘white privilege’.

2 Work on race and racialisation as it relates to Eastern Europe has been appearing simultaneously as this Special Issue was being assembled (e.g. Burry, Hashamova, and Rucker-Chang 2021; Koobak, Tlostanova, and Thapar-Björkert 2021) and so could not be discussed here. Inevitably also, due to the time lag inherent in publishing refereed academic work, much interesting recent material is available only on web sites, blogs, and social media. One group that engages in particularly stimulating debates is the Central European Feminist Research Network (https://twitter.com/CEE_Feminisms). Readers will also find instructive content on the web site maintained by Zoltán Ginelli (https://zoltanginelli.com/). In this Introduction, I am for the most part citing only refereed work that was already published at the time of writing.

3 https://twitter.com/jan_dutkiewicz/status/1518659985131069440

4 The seafaring metaphor is also used by Wallerstein (1976:, 465), referring to how the unemployed might react to the system that produces their unemployment:

a politics that reflects the ‘clinging to a lifeboat’ of those still employed (or who, being so no longer, still hope to become so once again by ousting others still employed). The latter often provide the mass base for fascist movements.

5 Croatia and Turkey did object, but for reasons that had everything to do with their own agenda and nothing to do with the defense of Europe.

6 Croatia’s admission was delayed, even though it is a Latin Christian country, because of territorial disputes with (also Latin) Slovenia, which had been admitted earlier.

7 See the survey published by IPSOS and the Human Rights Spokesperson for Poland (2018).

8 An inspiring resource for the study of imperial rivalries in global history is Doyle (2020). The inter-imperial character of much of Eastern Europe is explored, with a focus on Transylvania, by Parvulescu and Boatcă (2022).