“Eurowhiteness and the EU’s borders”
with Hans Kundnani (London School of Economics)
03.06.2025, 14:15-15:45 CEST, Ort: KWZ 0.609, Heinrich-Düker Weg 14, Göttingen
The guest lecture is organised by CeMig in cooperation with the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) and the Erasmus Mundus MA EurocultureAbstract: "In this talk I will locate the developments of the EU’s approach to its borders in the context of the wider transformation of Europe that I discuss in my book Eurowhiteness (2023). I argue that the EU has come to see itself as surrounded by threats and, especially since the refugee crisis in 2015, has increasingly understood those threats in civilizational terms – what I call the civilizational turn in the European project. In this context, a hard external border has come to be seen as the necessary corollary of the removal of border checks within the Schengen area. Since the end of the Cold War, the contrast between the EU’s soft eastern border and hard southern border has strengthened the identity of the EU as a white bloc. But since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 the eastern border has itself become harder as the EU has differentiated more clearly between who belongs and who doesn’t."
Hans Kundnani is an Open Society Ideas Workshop fellow and a visiting professor in practice at the London School of Economics. He was previously the director of the Europe programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London, a senior Transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He has also been a visiting fellow at the Remarque Institute at New York University and at the New School. He has taught at Boston University, New York University and the Collège d’Europe.
Hans is the author of three books: Eurowhiteness. Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (London: Hurst, 2023); The Paradox of German Power (London/New York: Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2014), which has been translated into German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish; and Utopia or Auschwitz. Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust (London/New York: Hurst/Columbia University Press, 2009). He studied German and philosophy at Oxford University and journalism at Columbia University in New York, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. He tweets @hanskundnani.