The ‘European’ Question: Migration, Race, and Post-Coloniality in ‘Europe’

Abstract

What is ‘Europe’? Who is a ‘European’? At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the ‘European Question’ has taken on a new significance and magnitude – above all in Europe itself, but also in its increasingly amorphous, externalised border zones and beyond. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, social movements were often pressed to address various political problems in terms of, for example, ‘the Jewish Question’ (or, in the United States, ‘the Negro Question’); thus, they approached these questions from the largely unexamined vantage point of relative privilege and power. In the wake of decolonisation on a global scale, this chapter proposes that there is an urgent need to critically formulate the European Question – as a problem of postcolonial whiteness – from the vantage point of transnational and intercontinental migration and the cross-border mobility of migrants. On a global scale, migration is implicated in socio-political and spatial conflicts that are defined on the basis of constructions of identity and difference, belonging and foreignness. Likewise, migration tends to be inseparable from ongoing socio-political processes of racialisation and racial formation. How, then, may we begin to examine anew the problems of European identity and the contradictory and competing productions of a European space – as racial formations and racial projects? By focusing a critical postcolonial lens on the very questions of European nationhood and ‘European’ identity more generally, the postcolonial politics of migration and race may serve to problematise some of the most urgent and dire perplexities of the contemporary European scene.