On the 24th of September 2025, Hans Kundnani presented his book, Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project, at the UC Berkeley Institute of European Studies. Kundnani, an Open Societies Ideas Workshop fellow and visiting professor of practice at the London School of Economics, is currently at the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley as a visiting fellow. A Germanist, Kundnani has published three books, the first two of which survey varied aspects of German history and nationality. However, when presenting his third and latest book to an audience of over two dozen people in Philosophy Hall, Kundnani stressed his conscious emphasis to analyse Europe beyond Germany and to explicate beyond nationality altogether.
An exploration of the history of European identity, Kundnani’s intervention addressed the concept of being ‘European’ – an adjective erroneously and subconsciously associated with cosmopolitanism and inclusion. Kundani demystified this concept, expounding its only constant: its definition against a (changing) series of Others. Originally framed as synonymous with Christianity—against the ‘Others’ of Jews and Muslims, as in the Spanish Reconquista—Kundnani argues that ‘Europeanness’ gradually shifted away from religion and towards the idea of whiteness. Thanks to a question posed by an audience member, Kundnani elucidated on the changes that whiteness, as a concept in-and-of-itself, has faced throughout European history, especially on the borders of the colonial projects of European nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Still, he emphasized that this flexible definition of whiteness is conventionally understood to have served as the meter-stick for ‘Europeanness,’ at least until the second half of the twentieth century.
Common knowledge, Kundnani argued, would have one believe that from this point onwards the European project (within a now increasingly integrated Europe,) became a civic project, whereby the Other was defined not by immutable, ethnocultural traits, but by their adherence to European values and identities. However, Kundnani disagreed with this heuristic understanding of ‘Europeanness.’ Rather, he stressed that the ethno/cultural dimension of Othering in Europe never truly disappeared—that whiteness remained key to being European.
For Kundnani, three clear phases of the European project emerge, building to the conception of ‘Eurowhiteness’ that gives name to his book. The foundational period of the Union, from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War sees European integration as an ultimately colonial project, argues Kundnani, being driven through colonialism and with colonial intention – something he defined as the ‘original sin’ of the European Union. Next, he described a period from the end of the Cold War to around 2010, an era of European enlargement and pan-Europeanism—but, ultimately, also the revival of a European civilising mission narrative, leading then to the present: an era of protection and defense. Citing French President Macron’s “l’Europe qui protégé” (the Europe that protects), Kundnani described the modern, post-crisis Europe as one that is insular, closed-off, and increasingly far-right, with the ethno-cultural conception of ‘Europeanness’ (‘Eurowhiteness’) becoming growingly, and concerningly, foundational to the Union – a Union that is, in-and-of-itself, more threatened than ever before.