This issue examines the history and contemporary articulations of racial capitalism within Europe. Challenging the idea that Europe is a homogeneous white entity, it interrogates how racialization and colonization have long been central to capital accumulation within the heart of empire. Today Europe's (post)imperial present remains underwritten by neocolonial relations of extraction, projects of Indigenous dispossession, and racialized regimes for controlling the mobility and availability of labor. Migrant guest workers helped build many European welfare states, even as they were denied full rights and citizenship. Extraction economies in the Arctic and northern Fennoscandia continue to dispossess and displace Europe's Indigenous peoples, while destroying planetary conditions for life. And the common market increased labor mobility within the EU while opening up central and eastern Europe to capital and closing the border to migrants from Europe's former colonies and refugees fleeing US-led wars. With specters of fascism and racialized moral panics over immigration and (white) demographic decline on the rise, this special issue contends that reckoning with Europe's links to racial capitalism, both historical and contemporary, is not only diagnostically probative but also politically urgent.
Bufkin et al. (Thu,) studied this question.