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

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.