Abstract
White But Not Quite proposes an innovative theoretical framework, introducing some new notions and building on others now being developed by a growing community of progressive researchers. I feel deeply honored that some of the most important among them have agreed to participate in this symposium. I am grateful to Bolaji Balogun for convoking this group of accomplished scholars, as well as contributing to the symposium himself, and I am thankful to Cultural Sociology for publishing the resulting conversation. 1 The book’s topics range widely. No reviewer could be expected to cover them all. Nor am I able to respond to everything in all of the five reviews, each of which presents a distinct perspective. What I will do here is outline the main goals and analyses of White But Not Quite, articulating these with the reviewers’ comments and questions in mind.
Eastern Europeanism
The focal point of the book is what I call ‘Eastern Europeanism,’ a set of discourses and practices that establish and express western superiority over, and domination of, ‘Eastern Europe.’ I liken Eastern Europeanism to discourses of colonial domination, and refer to it as a form of racism. Illiberalism in Central Europe is a misguided reaction against Eastern Europeanism. It is a revolt that is itself racist.
The first task faced by the book is to dismantle the assumptions of Eastern Europeanism. Like all racisms, Eastern Europeanism typically (though not always) flattens difference, so that the individuals, the groups, and the regions targeted by it are imagined as all the same. One example is the uncritical lumping together of Central and Eastern Europe. I begin the book by countering this Eastern Europeanist insensitivity to difference, by detailing Central Europe’s distinctive history and ideological projects (chs 1–3), and then by examining the empirical evidence of its economic, cultural, and political difference from the rest of ‘Eastern Europe’ (ch. 4). The data do show that in many important ways Central Europe is similar to areas of ‘Eastern Europe,’ but the demonstrable similarities are not enough either to generate a consistent East–West divide, or to place Central Europe squarely on the eastern side of such a divide. Often, East–West difference is produced not by the evidence, but by confirmation bias.
This imagined, self-confirming difference is deeply rooted in the history of western thought. Yet, as I argue, Eastern Europeanism in its current form arose when Central Europe was incorporated in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. When the Cold War ended and Central Europe restored capitalism on the western pattern and joined NATO and the European Union, discourses about ‘Eastern European’ difference only increased. I suggest that (as Turda also points out in this Symposium) it is after 1989 that Eastern Europeanism really came into its own.
This does not mean that Eastern Europeanism is entirely new and is thus merely a ‘prejudice’ that could be ‘turned on and off at will’ (Lewicki). On the contrary, the whole purpose of Chapter 2 (‘How Central Europe became Eastern European’) is to introduce the reader early on to Eastern Europeanism’s precedents. Nor does the detailed history I present there deny the role of anti-Slavism (Boatcă). In fact, an entire section of that chapter, entitled ‘Anti-Slavism and German–Slavic Rivalry’ (pp. 54–67), addresses this important issue. I sum up by locating the origins of Eastern Europeanism, and its inclusion of Central Europe, ‘not in the Enlightenment, partly in anti-Slavism, largely in the Cold War, and substantially in the post-communist era’ (p. 72).
Identifying Central Europe as different from ‘Eastern Europe’ also happens to be a matter of ethnographic fact. I speak here as a person with roots in Central Europe myself: the primary supranational identification of people living in the four countries discussed is that they are Central Europeans. Central Europeans have sought to invest this distinct identity with positive content. Chapter 3 details the long development of the ambition ‘to make Central Europe central to Europe’ (p. 104), from 19th-century German–Austrian efforts to mediate between the West and Russia, to the reform communists’ proposal of a Third Way between western capitalism and Soviet-style socialism. I quote Timothy Garton Ash (1986), who recognized that Central Europe was a project, a ‘kingdom of the spirit.’
It is another issue altogether that the distinctiveness of ‘Central Europe’ can be misused to attempt to bring Central Europeans closer to the West while preserving the East–West distinction and even emphasizing its racializing power (on pp. 97 and 198, I cite Buchowski 2006 and Barša 2019, respectively, to this effect). I do not argue for the innocence of the notion of Central Europe – far from it – but I do present it as making distinctive claims that need to be examined in all of that notion’s contexts: historical, economic, sociological, and anthropological.
These contexts include the wider constructions of whiteness and race, to which, both in the book and in this Rejoinder, I turn next.
Racism Against and Racism by Central Europeans, as Consequences of Racial Capitalism
My approach rests on two different analytical dimensions, one discursive and the other economic. The father of Tunisian independence, Habib Bourguiba, noted that ‘colonialism was not just humiliation. It was also exploitation, a displacement of riches’ (Haski and Ltifi, no date). 2 In this sense, the relation between the East and West of Europe can be likened to that between the Global South and North. Bourguiba was reminding us that this relation has affective/discursive as well as material aspects.
There are many aspects to the humiliation Central (and Eastern) Europeans may feel in their relation to the West. In Chapter 7, I focus on the rejection of ‘Eastern Europeans’ as capable of becoming fully Western or fully European. Many try to be accepted, but are labeled as no more than poor imitators. I identify this form of humiliation with what I believe Homi Bhabha discussed in his famous essay on ‘colonial mimicry’ (1984). Polemically, I read Bhabha’s work along with Krastev and Holmes’ best-seller The Light That Failed (2019), which presents Europe’s post-communist democracies as nothing but an imitation that never had a chance to succeed, botched because democracy was incompatible with the political and cultural heritage of ‘Eastern Europe’. While Krastev and Holmes’ work has many merits, in the end it reinforces Eastern Europeanism, without challenging either its empirical claims or its material foundations.
White But Not Quite maintains that the main material foundations of Eastern Europeanism lie not in local culture or history taken out of its global context, but in racial capitalism in its late 20th-century neoliberal, ‘globalist’ form, which counted 1989 as perhaps its greatest triumph.
I introduce this point early in the book: It is in the nature of capitalism to create groups and regions destined to provide cheap labour and to become a captive market for goods. This was also the logic that applied to the ‘Eastern enlargement’ of the EU. The East has had to compete with a much richer and more powerful West. When it became apparent that, as a result, the East was not ‘catching up’, its ‘failure’ was attributed, by many in the West, to its being congenitally, inherently, culturally backward. But Central Europe’s failure to become as prosperous and as liberal as the West must be viewed as largely wrought by the invisible hand of intervention by Western-dominated, global market neoliberalism [. . .]. To be blind to this, and instead to blame ‘Eastern European’ backwardness for what is very much the West’s doing, is racist. (p. 5)
A Class Alliance
The humiliation Central Europeans experienced as being viewed as still different (and even more so) after their ‘return’ (p. 99) to the West, arose on top of the underlying disappointment that, although formal democracy and an uneven rise in prosperity was achieved, this was only so at the cost of greatly increased class and regional inequalities, and above all did not result in the expected ‘catch up’ with the West.
As Balogun suggests, the proper reaction should have been one that affirmed solidarity with other peripheralized and racialized groups, especially in the Global South. Some Central Europeans, indeed, entered on that path. But the illiberal reaction was, instead, a radical nationalism. Nationalism is ontologically connected to racism. In Central Europe it supports alliances with other nationalisms, formed on the basis of a shared assertion of wrongly denied superiority. It complains of a betrayal by the ‘woke’ West of the very racial values that underlie western privilege. Illiberals are far from being anti-western, but rather want to rescue the West from the liberal elites who, as they see it, encourage outsiders, such as migrants of color and sexual minorities, to undermine ‘European values.’ The chances of this salvage operation are better, as they see it, in Central Europe than in the West. In Orbán’s words, ‘the West in its spiritual sense [. . .] has moved to Central Europe: the West is here, and what is left over there is merely the post-West’ (Orbán, 2022). This idea is wholeheartedly supported by illiberals in the West (ch. 5). This professed desire, to make the West great again, is rooted in a new realignment of classes and class segments.
As much as Lewicki, and for the same reasons, I reject the overused cliché of the working class, or as they say in America, the ‘white male without a college education,’ being the principal originator, the enthusiastic supporter, and the main culprit responsible for the ascendancy of illiberalism. The ‘white working class’ is, as Toscano argues, not a class but a phantasm ‘laminated’ onto class (Toscano, 2023). But yet, it is also ‘terribly, performatively real’ (Toscano, 2023). When I speak of illiberalism among working and (I carefully add) middle class people, I refer not to a class as such but to those among them who, as Toscano puts it citing DuBois, are seduced by the ‘psychological wages’ of whiteness (Toscano, 2023). Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, I stress the importance of paying careful attention not only to the lower but also to the higher social strata; not only to labor but also, and especially, to capital.
I do so specifically in the section of Chapter 8 entitled ‘National capitalism.’ The victory of the capitalist West in 1989 was widely felt to be proof of the superiority of a particular stage of capitalism, commonly described as ‘neoliberal globalization.’ The transnational corporations that accumulated the riches that this period produced were in fact not truly global. The profits went mainly to internationally active investors in the ‘world-class cities’ of the West, and to their partners in places like Japan, Singapore, and Dubai. This process of capital accumulation was based largely on dismantling national regulations blocking the expansion of international capital. It soon ran afoul of competitors who demanded state protection and the re-establishment of national barriers to ‘globalization.’
Chinese capital saw itself as requiring state protection in its response, both within and outside China. More relevant to the book is Russian capital, which, stronger than that of Central Europe, was more able to mobilize the state in support of its own interests vis-à-vis the transnationals. Central European capital did not have the luxury of resisting the same way, because it lacks local resources and because it functions within the strongly integrated framework of the EU and the broader western economy. Yet from the beginning there were groups among the post-1989 ‘democrats’ who increasingly demanded that the state support local capitalists in competition with the West. These included people owning or managing construction companies, natural resource extraction, or nationalized banks, as opposed to those in international finance or the local investors in and managers of transnational manufacturers and retailers.
Illiberalism aims to advance the interests of these ‘national’ capitalists in competition (though also in cooperation) with transnational capital, relying on the protection of the nation state. 3
Certainly, there is little evidence that, anywhere, most ‘working-class’ people with low education and/or rural residence support this illiberal project, grounded as it is in the interests of the national capitalists. Illiberal parties seldom if ever get a majority of such people’s vote; and certainly not if we take into account, as we should, the widespread apathy causing large numbers of them to abstain from voting at all (Mondon and Winter, 2019). And yet, it is part of the reality of illiberalism that in most places people with less education, lower income, and rural residence are disproportionately represented among illiberal voters, especially those who identify with the majority ethnoracial group. These are those elements of the working population whom ‘Subcomandante Marcos’ described long ago as ‘those who still have jobs’ (1997), and who are more interested in saving them than they are in uniting with those who have lost them already.
What might be inducing these working people to join forces, seemingly against their class interests, with segments of capital? The truth is that, like ‘national’ capital, the ‘national’ working and middle classes, too, do have some reason to fear international competition. They want to protect their jobs, including those offered by the transnationals, against even cheaper labor outside the European Union. And those who go to Western Europe for work must compete with people moving from the Global South. So it is not incomprehensible that some ‘ordinary people’ opt for ‘integration through racism’ (Garapich et al., 2023; see also Fox and Mogilnicka, 2019; Narkowicz, 2023; Rzepnikowska, 2023), much as it is morally reprehensible, as well as self-defeating on a more deep-going class analysis (see e.g. Kim et al., 2022).
Whiteness
Whiteness plays an important role as the affective cement of this illiberal class alliance. It replaces class antagonisms with kinship-like feelings of shared identity (I completely agree here with Mach, 2022 and its reading by Pędziwiatr in this Symposium). I do not reify whiteness as primordial or in any sense objectively given; how whiteness is contingently constructed is examined extensively in Chapter 1. The place of whiteness in illiberal rhetoric can be taken by other linguistic or religious identities, as in Erdogan’s Turkey or Modi’s India. The flexible content of illiberal majoritarianism is also demonstrated by the fact that in recent years it has almost everywhere increased its reliance on homophobic rhetoric, embedded in patriarchal ‘family values.’
Even so, neither its constructed nature, nor its contingent association with illiberalism means that whiteness is unimportant in those parts of the world I call ‘the white periphery.’ Here some groups struggle to secure their white privilege, the only kind of privilege they may be able to claim. Their activities animate an international alliance of white supremacists, encouraged by the Russian government (Shekhovtsov, 2017), who see ‘Eastern Europe’ as the last preserve of the White Man (ch. 5).
Whiteness does not only function as the unmarked term in the semiotic system of racial capitalism. It is also a named construct that negotiates distance from Blackness (Balogun). Racial capitalism produces continuities within its racial categorizations, of people as more, or less, ‘White’ (52–54, 182–183). The relativity of whiteness and of all racial categories is essential to my approach. Recognizing this relativity ensures that I do indeed provide ‘both a global framework in which to situate racializations, and a systematic treatment of the way in which they have been historically entangled’ (Boatcă). The first is racial capitalism, and the second is the historical developments discussed in Chapters 1–3.
The support for illiberalism by a segment of the white working and middle classes, in alliance with a segment of capital is, to be sure, one of those sensitive topics that can easily be misused by the illiberal Right, as Lewicki rightly points out. But abandoning an empirically driven, nuanced discussion of it would do little for either the task of uncovering the facts or of investing them with a reasonable interpretation.
On a related matter: I devote Chapter 8 mainly to the illiberal refrain, articulated years ago by Viktor Orbán, ‘We will not be a colony!’ In the concluding Chapter 9, I illustrate how, in Central Europe, illiberal ‘anti-colonialism’ works in media representations of, and ordinary discussions about, soccer football. Yet would anyone suggest that progressive scholars should abandon a critique of colonialism because it has been usurped by the Right? On the contrary, such topics must be included if we are to propose a consistent alternative, understood by the public.
Future Perspectives
In keeping with my goal of developing a wide-ranging response to illiberalism, I have written White But Not Quite in hopefully accessible language. (Many of its theses are condensed in more technical terms in my introduction to a 2023 special journal issue I co-edited with Lewicki (Kalmar, 2023), in which work by Balogun and Pędziwiatr, 2023 also appears.) I examine Central Europe’s illiberal revolt from a range of perspectives, but I do not take a deterministic approach. My analysis of it is genealogical, in the Foucauldian sense of presenting the conditions of possibility for illiberalism in the area. No single set of circumstances can be identified that will of necessity produce the same kind and the same degree of illiberalism. Yet Pędziwiatr’s challenge, to explain why conditions similar to Poland and Hungary did not generate an illiberal ascendancy everywhere, is a useful question that needs to be explored.
Turda’s focus on eugenics adds a necessary aspect to the relativity of whiteness just discussed. For if one can be more or less Western, more or less white, more or less European, then one can not only aim to move oneself closer to that goal, but also forcibly induce others to do so, leading to the shameful practices that Turda and others (e.g. Shmidt, 2018) have explored.
I find Balogun’s contribution to be one of the most inspiring. We are accustomed to consider whiteness to be the term around which all racialization pivots. But what if, as Balogun suggests, we take Blackness as a starting point, as ‘a critical standpoint and a way of relating to universal processes of exclusion and inclusion’ (Balogun, this Symposium)? Could that be the next step in decolonizing the study of race in Central Europe?
I move in a related direction in the book’s Conclusion, where I suggest that what will break the hold of illiberalism on Central Europe may not be what white people do but rather the impact made by people of color, especially as their number inevitably increases in the future.
There is much more still to be done in studying race and illiberalism in Central Europe. I hope to continue the work of White But Not Quite, in continued conversation with the five scholars who have honored me and my book by participating in this Symposium.
