Hans Kundnani, "Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Jan 1, 2026

Hans Kundnani, a scholar focused on European politics, explores the complex intersections of culture, race, and identity in his book, Eurowhiteness. He shares his personal journey with his mixed Dutch-Indian heritage and the uneasy relationship with European identity. Kundnani connects modern European identity to colonialism and discusses how the EU has been a vehicle for imperial amnesia. He highlights controversial topics like neo-colonial practices, the implications of Brexit, and the tensions between regionalism and cosmopolitan ideals.

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INSIGHT

Personal Roots Shaped European Doubts

Hans Kundnani traces his mixed Dutch-Indian-British background as shaping his partial European identity and doubts about full belonging.
His personal experience triggered investigation into why some colleagues proudly identify as European while he could not fully relate.

INSIGHT

EU Self-Myth Masks Historical Realities

Kundnani argues the EU is self-mythologized as a cosmopolitan peace project rather than examined historically.
He started studying EU history more deeply and found gaps between myth and the institution's real origins.

INSIGHT

Europeanness And Whiteness Evolved Together

Kundnani links medieval Christendom and the Enlightenment-era Europe to evolving ideas of Europe, including whiteness.
He argues modern European identity and whiteness developed together during colonial encounters.

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"Today’s 'pro-Europeans' would be horrified at the suggestion that their idea of Europe had anything to do with whiteness. In fact, many would find the attempt to link the two baffling and outrageous," writes Hans Kundnani in Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project (Oxford UP, 2023).

Yet, he does so - taking the reader on a historical journey through the development of European identity from Christendom to the coincidence of the Enlightenment and the development of colonialism to the pan-European movement that grew out of the first world war and peace project (or was it?) that emerged from the second.

Not only is pro-Europeanism “analogous to nationalism - something like nationalism but on a larger, continental scale," Kundani argues, but the EU itself has “become a vehicle for imperial amnesia" thereby promoting and privileging “whiteness”.

Hans Kundnani is a fellow at the Open Society Foundations Workshop, an associate scholar at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), and a visiting scholar at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School for Social Research. From 2018-22, he was a full-time researcher at Chatham House, including as director of the Europe Programme. Before that, he was a researcher at the German Marshall Fund, the Transatlantic Academy, and the European Council on Foreign Relations. In 2014, he published The Paradox of German Power.

*The author's own book recommendations are Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism by Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015) and The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon (Penguin Modern Classics, 2006 - first published in 1956)

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series.

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