Guest Lecture by Hans Kundnani: "Eurowhiteness and the EU’s borders"

Guest Lecture "Eurowhiteness and the EU’s borders"

With Hans Kundnani (London School of Economics)

Date and Time: 3 June 2025, 14:15-15:45 CEST,

Venue: KWZ 0.609 (Heinrich-Düker Weg 14).

Abstract: "In this talk I will locate the developments of the EU’s approach to its borders in the context of the wider transformation of Europe that I discuss in my book Eurowhiteness (2023). I argue that the EU has come to see itself as surrounded by threats and, especially since the refugee crisis in 2015, has increasingly understood those threats in civilizational terms – what I call the civilizational turn in the European project. In this context, a hard external border has come to be seen as the necessary corollary of the removal of border checks within the Schengen area. Since the end of the Cold War, the contrast between the EU’s soft eastern border and hard southern border has strengthened the identity of the EU as a white bloc. But since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 the eastern border has itself become harder as the EU has differentiated more clearly between who belongs and who doesn’t."

Hans Kundnani is an Open Society Ideas Workshop fellow and a visiting professor in practice at the London School of Economics.

This lecture is organised by CeMig in cooperation with the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) and Erasmus Mundus MA Euroculture.

Find the pdf here.