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Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to New Books in European Politics. I'm Tim Jones and my guest today is Hans Kudnani. author of Euro-Whiteness, Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project, published on August the 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 amnesia and therefore promotes and privileges. is whiteness. Hans Kundnani 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 to 22, he was full-time researcher at Chatham House, including as director of the Europe Programme. In 2014, he published the book, The Paradox of German Power. Hans, welcome. Thank you very much, Tim, for having me. Let's start with your introduction. And there you describe Euro whiteness as a rather personal book. Can you explain why? 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 family. So my father was Indian, my mother's Dutch. And so I have, but I'm British and I grew up in London and spent most of my life 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 the way in which I think about my own European identity, I suppose, I think has a lot to do with that.
background um and in particular you know the fact that i have a you know one parent who is from uh an eu member state of 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 because my father was Indian, you know, I have one parent who is not from Europe, from the country outside of Europe that was colonized by Britain. And so 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 being fully European, being 100 percent European, as I've heard some people describe themselves. And actually, that was 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 a little bit the sort of beginning of the process that ultimately um led to this book as you say you write that while you're 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 uh 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 neighbours, and it sort of drove him mad. I wondered whether being surrounded by people who were just excessively... pro-European in a in a sort of knee-jerk federalist way that perhaps made you and Gisela Stewart was another example yeah yeah was there anything like that at ECFR
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... people think they do, precisely because there is a certain sort of idea of what the EU is and what it stands for. 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. And 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
But when I was at ECFR, 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 mythologized the way that it's perceived, and then the reality of 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 in a bad way i i thought and and so um you know The second book that I wrote, which you mentioned, The Paradox of German Power, 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.
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. So 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 process 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. 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 at Cologne.
to pan-European movement coming out of the First World War and where we've got to today since the Second World War and the Holocaust. Can you take us through the argument in summary form? Yeah, 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. to the post-war integration project that becomes the EU. But Chapter 2 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...
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 of Christianity and gradually then you know 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 of Christianity, is Charlemagne, who remains this... this sort of icon for the current EU, right? I mean, in particular, if you think about something like the Charlemagne Prize, you know, the most prestigious prize for pro-Europeans is awarded in the name of Charlemagne. So that's the... kind of medieval idea of Europe.
and European identity. And then what happens in the modern period is something much more complicated, where 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 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 Europe.
with the populations of Africa and Asia and in particular the Americas.
And in that context, the more modern idea of Europe that emerges is also very closely connected to the idea of whiteness. The two concepts, the 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 and so um 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 understood that they meant the same thing.
And that's an illustration of, I think, a wider connection between those two kind of ideas. So that's really the argument in that sort of second chapter. And so what it basically tries to do is kind of set up... history of ideas of Europe before the European Union really gets going. And then the assumption that I think a lot of pro-Europeans make is that after 1945, you get this completely new idea of European identity that has nothing to do with the
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 realise 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.
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 integrations since the end of the second world war in terms of empires rather than being built by empires rather than nation states and you you are now writing in what is developing as
tradition, 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? Yeah, I mean, here I should emphasize 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, there have been multiple scholars now that have done this work on basically the intersection of European colonialism with European... And yet, you know, this has been going on for 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 these are people who work on Europe and the EU, it's a full-time job, right? And who consider themselves pro-Europeans and consider themselves... experts in Europe and quoted in the New York Times and so on. If you tell them about this early period of European integration, 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 European project. 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 you know of of the early phase of the european of european integration this is what i meant about the self mythologization right in particular this idea of the eu as a peace project you know which is not completely wrong it's just it's very
incomplete in the sense that at the moment when Robert Schumann announces the Schumann Plan, which is often seen as the beginning of the EU as a peace project. You know, France is fighting a brutal colonial war in Indochina. And similarly, you know, 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 is, 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, you know, that's all, as I say, you know, being shown very, very clearly and very persuasively by, you know, by multiple scholars. Probably the most important book, I think, on this is P.O. Hansen and Stefan Janssen, Your Africa.
which wasn't the first account of this, but is, I think, the most definitive account of this. thing that was called the Europe Africa project, which was precisely about, you know, European integration, but including Africa as Europe's plantation. I mean, that language was used.
and uh you know that you know as i that that that's been shown very clearly we 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 policy world. Coming to the elision between regionalism, which I think you make a very fine point there, which is that many pro-Europeans, and I would add myself to that cohort, probably would consider themselves...
internationalists and cosmopolitan, whereas in fact what they are is regionalists. 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, Josef Boric, 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 what?
whiteness or dirty whiteness isn't it just an in group and an out group 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 you know complete it's a short book as as you mentioned but i guess roughly you know
I guess 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 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 what you... I don't get into this in much detail in the book, but I think if you look at particularly France's relationship with its former colonies in Africa after they've become formally independent.
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 that came out a couple of years ago, Africa's Last Colonial Currency, it's called. And this has now, you know, become sort of a... 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 that 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 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... that european integration creates and then the way the sort of story develops later on is is that
in the last decade or so i think um the eu is of moving away from that civic identity back to something more ethnic and cultural again but that's at least the sort of the the interpretation of story of european integration i have in the book um 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 Western Europeans basically look down on Central and Eastern Europeans and they basically... The way that the EU puts it was that, as it does with all accession countries, is that they need to do structural reform. 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.
you can also think about that whole process in terms of kind of a civilizing mission essentially and there's a academic young young joelanka who was at oxford for many years it's an anthony's who made this argument that um the eu had a kind of a new postmodern civilising mission in its neighbourhood 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.
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 a return to Europe? In what sense were they returning to Europe? You know, in other words...
The idea of a return to your obsessive, 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, you know, the social market economy and the welfare state and the depoliticized 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 Josef Baric's work, that there's a way in which we can think of the return to Europe as a kind of return to whiteness. 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 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 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 centre-right parties and voters in these countries that are looking for a rest.
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.
And clearly, 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 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 is an interesting case, right? Because he didn't...
He wasn't always like this, right? His views have evolved over time. And one of the expressions, one of the manifestations of that was the way that he was in the European People's Party for a very, very long time. Right. And 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 and thinking here, you know,
and people like that, they really have nothing to say about how and why this happened, except these are some bad people, right? So I sort of sometimes think of this as a sort of stupid people and bad people thesis. Basically, what's happened in our politics over the last...
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. That seems to me entirely inadequate as an explanation of what happened. 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 Orban 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 more problematic ethnic cultural ideas of Europe were there from the beginning. 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 in Europe is very much there in Kundera. And Kundera is not, you know, 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 that. One example of that is, you know, one of the... immediate consequences. of the enlargement in the 2000s was to strengthen the block of countries that wanted to write into the European constitution, which was then being developed, you know, ultimately was rejected.
voters in France and the Netherlands and then get repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty. But at that time, the enlargement of Central and Eastern European countries had the effect of strengthening the bloc of countries that wanted to write into the European constitution that Europe was... Christian.
But that is part of, you know, what Europe stands for and what its identity is. And as I say, that that that wasn't yet, 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 these ideas are more prevalent than you're suggesting.
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 bulwark against atheistic communism. Exactly.
Yeah, exactly. 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 few decades and then my whole argument is they've in the last you know decade in particular but I think this does go back to you know has a slightly longer history going back
the end of the cold war and so on these ethnic cultural elements uh in european identity get stronger and a part of that story again i don't want to i don't want to overstate it but i think a part of that story is the um accession of central and eastern european countries which have strengthened those uh basically civilizational tendencies within the eu 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 depoliticised within the EU, political contestation has shifted to issues around identity, immigration and Islam, end quote. So can you talk us through that? And is that is that that was your sort of. turning point from 2010 onwards i guess yeah 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 depth.
There is, I suppose, one of the themes in the story I tell about the evolution of the EU in the last few decades has to do with this shift from basically... economic questions 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, this is what is referred to in the US as the culture 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, hyperglobalization. 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.
roughly the way I think of how the EU fits into this kind of global story. And one of the features, I think, of that kind of backlash and of... hyper-globalization or hyper-regionalization and then the backlash against 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 centre of our political debates to cultural questions replacing them.
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 policy out of the space... space of democratic contestation.
And 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, you know, 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 alternatives...
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, story i tell in the book is is how you know the refugee crisis in in 2015 becomes this kind of turning point where the eu had already thought of itself as being increasingly threatened you know in the uh
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 mimic them and copy their rhetoric and their policies.
sort of european version i think of this broader story of a sort of shift from contestation over economic questions to contestation over um cultural questions well as a final question but it's a big one i Reading the book, I thought there was one big missing actor, and that was the minority population in the European Union. It's estimated that...
10% of the population. Okay, this is 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 is.
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 travelled more in Europe tended to vote remain, and the people who voted leave tended to be older, people who travelled 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 whiteness of representation in Brussels, for example.
There is this minority population that in many ways has similar attitudes on Europe to the white population, but in fact, more so. So, yeah, I'd be interested to hear your views on that.
So it's a good question to end on. I'm glad we sort of bring in the British... dimension of this um and and by the way it's it's it's interesting because you know the book only comes out next week but i'm already starting to have some discussions about it and i can already i can already sense that um uh you know and this was 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... uh come with me on that final oh no you lost me before that don't worry oh okay okay okay uh so okay so on on brexit and on the the question of
ethnic minorities in the UK and their attitudes to Brexit and to the EU. So, 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 is essentially being fairly absent from... the discussions we've had around Brexit in the last seven years or so. And in particular, the leave is so associated with the white working class. There's this tendency to sort of forget that it was actually much better.
more complicated than that and there were other people who don't belong to the white working class who were who were voting for for leave for all kinds of reasons you're absolutely right that actually in a way the striking thing about the about the the sort of rule numbers of you know leave and remain voters you know among uh 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
surviving 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 in the book.
go a little bit further I think there are two things that are quite important the first is that you know and this is I think the first is is what I think the Nima Begum research shows I have I've you know read it perhaps slightly differently than you I think it shows that 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... uh white voters you know so in particular they some some look at you know questions around Islamophobia and the refugee crisis in 2015 in slightly different ways than certainly 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 looks pretty similar to the white population of the UK. I think the more interesting question is... 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 of this as well for me.
I think 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 that 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? No, that wasn't the research. You're quite right. yeah you know so clearly there are some that were right but but broadly 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, you know.
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... basically during the course of my lifetime, to a large extent, as a consequence of the struggles of Black and Asian people in Britain to expand the definition of Britishness.
Interestingly, Englishness less so, right? Right, exactly. So Englishness is not quite there yet. And this is obviously something that you hear a lot of people say, as I can think of myself as British, I struggle to identify as English. I think that's actually changing now as well. But you're absolutely right. Britishness has long been perceived by Black and Asian Brits as being a more inclusive identity than Englishness.
The crucial point here is that it's more inclusive than European-ness, right? That 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 don'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. To finish, as usual, because this is a podcast about books, I've asked my guest to recommend two. one broadly from their field and one personal choice. So Hans, what have you chosen? The first book is one that 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 P.O. Hansen and Stefan Janssen called Your Africa, 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 to move beyond that sort of self mythologization of the EU. So this book, Your Africa, basically is the definitive account of the way.
That intersection between the final period of European colonialism and the early period of European integration shows how the two things are interconnected, in particular around this Europe Africa idea. 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 Pierre Hansen and Stefan Janssen. It 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... 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 favourite novels is by Sam Selvon. It's called The Lonely Londoners. It came out in, I think, 1956. And it's basically the first black British novel.
It's about the Windrush generation. Sam Selvon was from Trinidad. And he basically describes the lives of... It's a very, very short book, a very short novel. He basically describes the lives of... this first generation of many Caribbean men young men that came to Britain in the 1950s and And I love it partly because it's set in the part of West London that I live in. And so it gives you some incredible picture of what, of what Labyrinth Grove and these places, places around here were like.
at that time but it also um it just really captures the uh as i say the lives of that first generation of people that you can see in retrospect really transformed britain um but at the time the way they experienced it was as this you know day-to-day struggle to kind of um to kind of live and survive basically um it's very moving uh very very funny as well um and uh it's one of my favorite novels
Great. Well, they're both new to the tip sheet. So thanks for that. Today, I've been talking to Hans Gunnani about Euro Whiteness, published by Hearst on August the 17th. Hans, thanks again for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. It's been great fun talking to you.