Having shaken off nationalism, Europe risks civilisationalism

It is possibleEU EUEU EUEU to be black and Dutch, or for a person of Moroccan descent to be unequivocally French. But is it possible to be non-white and to think of oneself as “European”? In most ways, certainly. Plenty of non-white people are born in Europe, and a citizen of any country is a citizen of the bloc, no matter what their ethnicity. Yet the term “European” is sometimes also used to connote whiteness: in apartheid-era South Africa, the terms were interchangeable. Those who think of Europe as a civic construction—a place underpinned by laws and values that people freely adhere to—can welcome anyone as a citizen. But of late some have tended to think of Europe in civilisational terms, an idea rooted not just in laws and institutions but in history, culture and identity. To be European in that meaning is to be a place, to belong there, and therefore for others to belong. That has unsettling implications for those who live in Europe yet do not look traditionally European. Might eight decades of integration accidentally foment a form of ugly, pan-continental bigotry?The case that something discomfiting might be afoot is put forward by Hans Kundnani, a fellow at Chatham House, a think-tank in London. In “Eurowhiteness”, the British son of a Dutch mother and an Indian father describes his own inability (even before Brexit) to think of himself as 100% European, as many British liberals in pro-circles routinely do. Those who cheer the European project laud the way it consigned nationalist competition between members to history—forget fighting a war, being narrowly French or Swedish looks old-hat these days, at least outside football stadiums. Even the hard right seems to be stepping back from country-first nationalism. Leaving the was once a populist priority. Now the likes of Marine Le Pen in France and Viktor Orban in Hungary want Europeans to band together to collectively build higher fences better to keep Middle Easterners and Africans out instead.