Introduction
The European Union and Europe are at a crossroads. The postwar vision of Europe, built on the premise that new legal multilateral arrangements, monetary convergence, and social cohesion would serve as protective mechanisms against nationalism and war, is fracturing under financial crises, migration pressures, and sovereignty disputes. The last few years have been marked by profound disruptions, from the Eurozone debt traps and uneven Recovery Funds to border externalizations and Multiannual Financial Framework conditionality conflicts. These have exposed the EU’s foundational asymmetries, such as its shared currency without fiscal solidarity, free movement without equitable burden-sharing, and technocratic governance without democratic consent. These conflicts and tensions demand new frameworks to navigate economic divergence, geopolitical realignments, and competing visions of belonging in a world of hardened hierarchies (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2004; Reference Agathangelou, Hozic and True2016; Reference Agathangelou2019; Lapavitsas Reference Lapavitsas2019). The EU has had to adopt a new playbook as the global rules of the game evolve. Normalized confrontations, blurred peace-war lines, economic vulnerabilities, green transition challenges, and threats to the social model call for leadership to challenge assumptions, build capabilities, and navigate a changing world (Draghi Reference Draghi2024, Reference Draghi2025; Kinski et al. Reference Kinski, Gianna and Ripoll Servent2025).
The EU proclaims universal values such as peace, human rights, and convergence, yet it operationalizes policies that sustain racialized and economic exclusions. On the one hand, it presents itself as the defender of international law, civilian protection, and rules-based order; on the other, it arms allies, underwrites border and security regimes, and maintains uneven trade and resource relations that reproduce hierarchies of life and death (Musliu Reference Musliu, Bigo, Diez, Fanoulis, Rosamond and Stivachtis2020; Hawthorne and Kelly Reference Hawthorne and Kelly2022; Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2024; Myers Reference Myers2025). It champions a rules-based order but simultaneously enforces creditor discipline on Southern countries with debt, outsources borders’ control to third countries, and prioritizes Northern competitiveness over peripheral welfare. “Sovereign internationalism” (SI), as articulated by Hungarian refusals of the EU’s migration quotas, environmental standards, and human-rights regimes, speaks against the “regulatory sprawl” centered in Brussels and Strasbourg (Stokes Reference Stokes2025). For many Eastern and Southern Europeans, the EU’s overbearing, top-down project that sidelines national histories and preferences prevents international cooperation from being rooted in national sovereignty and explicit domestic consent. Shared policies on trade, migration, or climate should be ratified by national parliaments or referendums. Furthermore, states should be able to opt out of measures, such as EU refugee relocation schemes, that they deem contrary to their national interests, and cross-border cooperation should be built on voluntary pacts, not one-size-fits-all rules. The EU has a choice: it either clings to a failing liberal international order rooted in supranationalism or opts for reform along sovereign-internationalist lines where national democracies are primary, cooperation is voluntary, and European solidarity is grounded in national consent, not enforced from Brussels (Stokes Reference Stokes2025).
Across Europe, the left and the right use war and crises to tell starkly different stories about globalization and sovereignty. Those on the left critique neoliberal capitalism, militarized supply chains, and imperial wars justified in the name of human rights or security; they defend multilateral institutions and transnational movements, calling for demilitarization, redistribution, and an alternative globalization organized around social rights, ecological repair, and decolonization, not national closure (Lapavitsas Reference Lapavitsas2019). On the right, especially among nationalist and far-right forces, opposition to globalization is articulated as a defense of the nation against migrants and multilateral constraints. Global integration and foreign entanglements are threats to national identity and territorial integrity, and the EU and international law are obstacles to popular will, not checks on EU’s dominant violence (Givens 2020; Bickerton et al. Reference Bickerton, Brack, Coman and Crespy2022; Graef and Kundnani Reference Graef and Kundnani2025). These competing narratives converge uneasily in the EU arena: the left questions how Europe can claim a rules-based, humane order while remaining structurally embedded in the global economic and military arrangements that make today’s wars and their racialized devastations possible (Bhattacharyya et al. Reference Bhattacharyya, Virdee and Winter2020; Baier Reference Baier2023) and the right invokes national sovereignty to resist migration and deeper integration (Stokes Reference Stokes2025).
What is often missed is that both positions treat globalization and sovereignty as abstractions, not as concrete configurations of racial capitalism, empire, and their contingent violence that bind Europe to the very wars it is ostensibly judging. Leftist discourse foregrounds neoliberalism and US hegemony but understates Europe’s active role—through trade regimes, arms exports, border externalization, and biopolitical governance—in reproducing a global order divided along lines of race, life, and death (Maryon Reference Maryon2025; Bhambra Reference Bhambra2022; Mbembe Reference Mbembe2011). Right-wing narratives reduce the problem to the defense of national borders against external intrusion, obscuring how their own projects rely on global supply chains, security cooperation, and colonialism that tether national prosperity to distant devastations (Bhattacharyya Reference Bhattacharyya2018; Robinson Reference Robinson1983). What disappears in both frames is the racial and imperial character of the post-1945 arrangements, whereby multilateralism and national sovereignty alike have been historically structured, so some wars appear as necessary policing actions, some lives as collateral, and some colonizing violences as the normal price of security (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou, Hozic and True2016, Reference Agathangelou2019, Reference Agathangelouforthcoming a, Reference Agathangelouforthcoming b; Fanon Reference Fanon1967; El-Tayeb Reference El-Tayeb2004, Reference El-Tayeb2008; Balkenhol and Schramm Reference Balkenhol and Schramm2019; Lentin Reference Lentin2020). Leftist critiques target neoliberal extraction, but both right and left abstract globalization from its racial-capitalist moorings, missing how EU financial infrastructure (i.e., the Economic Monetary Union (EMU) and the European Stability Mechanism (ESM)) and migration regimes (i.e., the Dublin regulation and the New Pact on Migration and Asylum) co-produce hierarchies of life and death: exporters and banks over Southern workers, citizens over racialized migrants, citizens over African immigrants (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2019).
Will the EU remain a technocratic custodian of ordoliberal hierarchy, or will it confront its design as creditor-oriented and racially stratified? In his 2025 National Security Strategy, Donald Trump advanced a “Make Europe Great Again” initiative to reshape US-European ties, prioritizing US relationships with right-wing nations like Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland encouraging them to distance themselves from the EU (Myers Reference Myers2025). His strategy pairs NATO burden-sharing, withdrawals from Europe’s defense, and demands for self-reliance with a cultural agenda that supported pro-American parties and promoted “sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life” (Schaefer Reference Schaefer2025).
The EU must decide whether it will remain a cautious custodian of a compromised order or confront the ways order has always been asymmetrically enforced, that is, selective in whose sovereignty it protects and whose vulnerability it exploits. That decision turns the question back onto Europe itself. What role will it play in a geopolitically fractured landscape? More fundamentally, who is the EU for when the instruments grounding its moral and socio-political and economic authority are mobilized to authorize imperial violence?
The left focuses on the ways capital and empire are enacted through the EU practices and policies but underplays Europe’s active role in border violence and debt traps (Bhambra Reference Bhambra2022; El-Tayeb Reference El-Tayeb, Lionnet and Shi2011a, Reference El-Tayeb2011b; Stokes Reference Stokes2025). Right-wing narratives defend national sovereignty against migrants and EU overreach (Stokes Reference Stokes2025). In current EU budget and fiscal debates, Southern states are not treated evenly. Spain and Portugal are held up as “good pupils” because they reduced debt ratios, implemented labor-market reforms, and used Recovery and Resilience Facility funds in ways that align with Brussels’ priorities (green transition, digitalization, competitiveness). Their relative “fiscal prudence” is rewarded with political praise, smoother access to funds, and more flexibility in how they implement EU-backed reforms. By contrast, Italy is framed as a risk because of high debt and slow structural reforms, and Hungary is disciplined through the rule-of-law and budget conditionality, with parts of its EU funding frozen or delayed over concerns about judicial independence, corruption, and democratic backsliding. In practice, this means the EU’s long-term budget and conditionality regimes work more smoothly for fiscally “disciplined” or politically compliant governments, while high-debt or those considered illiberal states face tighter surveillance and stricter conditions. At the same time, those mechanisms say little about the welfare of non-indebted South outside the Eurozone, the social and racial hierarchies embedded in Eastern enlargement, or the lives of racialized border-crossers at the EU’s external frontiers. These actors mostly appear as objects to be stabilized, buffered, contained, or even let to die rather than as beneficiaries of the integration project (Country Report Portugal Reference Portugal2023).
The pivotal question of this special issue is “Who is the EU for?” Is it for polyarchic citizens, member states, global capital, elite technocrats, or the majority of those who ensure its viability? We draw on radical black traditions of thought on colonialism and anti-Blackness, critical political economy, postcolonial theory, and institutional analysis to dissect this analytic and raframe it demonstrating how the Union’s commitment to universal values coexists with practices that reproduce hierarchies of life and death. We argue that the EU operates as a form of global power that mobilizes race and racism as constitutive mechanisms of legitimacy, authority, mobility, and value. Contemporary militirization, through defense integration, rearmament, and strategic autonomy, intensifies these dynamics by recoding racialized hierarchies as security imperatives. Competing responses, from left critiques of neoliberalism to right-wing sovereign internationalism, rarely confront European colonialisms’ and racisms’ constitutive role of its global power and inequalities. These unresolved tensions and failures open up urgent questions about how Europe’s political and economic order continues to reproduce global hierarchies of power. It is precisely this tension that the special issue takes up, responding by engaging the intertwined colonial and racist projects in the EU. The contributors collectively frame crisis as a key site through which colonial and racialized violence is reconfigured, displaced, normalized, and contested in contemporary EU governance. The contributors further reposition the EU not as a neutral arbitrer of order, but as an active geopolitical site where racialized and imperial forms of power are continuously produced, contested, and reimagined. For the introduction and all the special issue’s articles several guiding questions emerge: What distinguishes sound from flawed reasoning in these debates? How do differing temporalities, crisis as aberration versus crisis as a constitutive feature, shape their contours? And how do the recalcitrance of Southern debtors and the persistence of migrant bodies challenge the EU’s ethical, socio-economic, and political claims? This issue engages these questions directly, rejecting the notion of convergence as consensus.
Race and Racism and the Co-Constitution of the EU and Racial Capitalism
This special issue argues the EU is a supranational extension of Europe’s colonial racial state, explicitly engineered for white sovereign subjects whose global supremacy depends on racial capitalism’s extractions, epidermalizing Southern/Black bodies as “standing reserves” through creditor hierarchies, border necropolitics, and the crisis of sociogeny that directly reproduce colonial Manichaeism (Chun Reference Chun, Nakamura and Chow-White2012, 47; Fanon Reference Fanon1963; Reference Fanon1967).
Colonial violence did not end with decolonization. EU integration co-constitutes global racial capitalism and its political order permeated through colonial logics and practices by naturalizing white Europe’s telos—universal peace, convergence, human rights—as planetary hegemony fabricated through ongoing derealization of racialized life, from Greek debt servitude to Mediterranean drownings (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2004, Reference Agathangelou, Hozic and True2016, Reference Agathangelou2019, Reference Agathangelouforthcoming a, Reference Agathangelouforthcoming b; Balibar and Wallerstein Reference Balibar and Wallerstein1991; Marriott Reference Marriott2018).
Liberal Intergovernmentalism and Economic Corporations and Elites as Drivers of Integration
Liberal intergovernmentalism theories, dominant in EU studies, conceptualize the EU as a project for national governments and domestic interest groups, exporters, multinationals, and pro-market elites, pressuring states to integrate for economic gains in a liberal international order (Lelieveldt and Princen Reference Lelieveldt and Princen2023). Integration’s historical path, from coal/steel spillovers to the single market, serves these societal players by locking in credible commitments to free trade and regulatory harmony, while slower progress in non-commercial domains reflects state bargaining to protect sovereignty. The EU thus exists for interconnected economic actors fostering peace through interdependence, not mass publics directly (Lelieveldt and Princen Reference Lelieveldt and Princen2023). Scholars examining state preferences and bargaining have challenged this optimistic trajectory by emphasizing the primacy of national interest formation and intergovernmental negotiation as the true drivers of integration outcomes (Moravcsik Reference Moravcsik1991, Reference Moravcsik1993, Reference Moravcsik1995, Reference Moravcsik1997, Reference Moravcsik1998).
These classical theories have provided invaluable analytical tools for understanding how supranational institutions emerge, how member states negotiate institutional design, and how integration deepens or stalls. This scholarship argues the EU’s primary goal is the serving of interconnected white economic elites and capital’s racialized preferences through free trade. As contemporary crises—from the treatment of asylum-seekers at Mediterranean borders to the failure of coordinated welfare responses during COVID-19—demonstrate, these frameworks have ignored critical questions about whose interests drive integration, which populations are rendered disposable through integration processes, and how the European project itself reproduces hierarchies inherited from colonial governance structures.
The literature on European integration theory acknowledges the evolution of federalism and neofunctionalism to social constructivism and critical political economy, but the classical preoccupation with institutional mechanics and efficiency has obscured how the European integration project functions as a technology for constituting racial and civilizational hierarchies while simultaneously advancing claims to universal democratic values (Wallace and Wallace Reference Wallace, Wallace, Jørgensen, Pollack and Rosamond2007; Wiener and Diez Reference Wiener and Diez2009). The “appeal to concerns regarding European values” enables the reproduction of exclusionary systems precisely because these values are operationalized through law, policy, and security procedures differentiating between those deemed deserving of European protection and those requiring containment, deportation, or exclusion (Nugent Reference Nugent2010, 115). This distinction maps directly onto racialized categories constructed through European colonial expansion (Bache and George Reference Bache and George2006) and reinforced by contemporary processes of racialization such that the promise of universal rights coexists with the systematic denial of rights to populations marked as foreign, Muslim, African, or otherwise incompatible with the imagined European identity and belonging (Hansen and Jonsson Reference Hansen and Jonsson2014).
Following the crises of the 1990s and early 2000s, EU scholars began to understand the EU as a complex, multi-level governance system rather than solely as an integration project amenable to grand theory (Kaunert Reference Kaunert2007, Reference Kaunert2010a, Reference Kaunert2010b, Reference Kaunert and Léonard2012; Kaunert et al. Reference Kaunert, Occhipinti and Léonard2014; Kaunert et al. Reference Kaunert, Argomaniz and Bures2015). This moved attention away from a narrow focus on whether supranational or intergovernmental poles dominate decision-making, toward an examination of how institutional structures, policy networks, and diverse actors interact across multiple territorial scales.
Recent literature examining how major crises reshape European integration trajectories illuminates both the adaptability of EU institutions and the persistence of racialized hierarchies within crisis response. Different crisis pressures—whether economic, pandemic-related, or security-driven—generate distinct decision-making scenarios, with combinations of crisis pressures producing diverse institutional responses (Kaunert Reference Kaunert2007, Reference Kaunert2010a, Reference Kaunert2010b, Reference Kaunert and Léonard2012; Kaunert and Leonard Reference Kaunert and Léonard2012; Kaunert et al. Reference Kaunert, Occhipinti and Léonard2014, Reference Kaunert, Argomaniz and Bures2015). The EU’s COVID-19 pandemic response, for instance, revealed both the capacity for rapid institutional adaptation and the persistence of intergovernmental negotiations in times of acute stress.
Crises are not aberrations of an otherwise functional integration project, but constitutive features of how the European project has been imagined, institutionalized, and operationalized. The financial and the refugee crises, which intensified in 2013 and 2015, exemplify this dynamic (Agathangelou et al. Reference Agathangelou, Hozic and True2016, Reference Agathangelou2019). The Eurozone crisis, for instance, peaking in Greece (2009–2018), was intensified by EMU’s design projects, that focus on a shared currency without fiscal transfers, exposing peripheral states to speculative attacks after Greece revealed its deficits (127% debt-to-GDP), triggering €326bn bailouts conditioned on austerity. This cut GDP 25 percent and spiked unemployment to 27 percent, causing Greece to privatize many of its assets, including the Piraeus port, to COSCO. This was not an aberration but constitutive of Europe’s ordoliberal architecture (Maastricht/Lisbon), where “no bailout” rules prioritized Northern creditors and financial capital over indebted citizens in the South, systematically channeling German surpluses into debt bubbles, and then extracting repayment through supranational discipline (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelouforthcoming b). The EU thus reveals itself as being for core exporters, banks, and technocratic elites, not peripheral workers or sovereign democracies, with crises as mechanisms enforcing this creditor hierarchy in its technocratic peace project (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelouforthcoming b). Instead of prompting a fundamental reconsideration of EU borders as sites of racialized exclusion, the refugee crisis catalyzed what scholars call an intensified securitization of migration governance, in which humanitarian rhetoric masks security operations.
The evolution of EU economic, migration, and border policy constitutes a crucial terrain for examining how integration processes simultaneously expand and restrict forms of belonging. From the early formation of the EMU—premised on the removal of currency barriers among participating states—to the Eurozone crisis mechanisms and the ESM, EU financial governance has developed from a framework emphasizing monetary convergence among European economies toward an increasingly creditor-centric apparatus targeting peripheral debtor nations like Greece (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou, Hozic and True2016, Reference Agathangelou2019). Similarly, the formation of the Schengen Area (premised on the removal of internal borders among participating states), as well as the Common European Asylum System and the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, has shifted EU migration governance from emphasizing free movement among European citizens toward an increasingly security-centric apparatus targeting non-European populations (Domínguez de Olazábal Reference Domínguez de Olazábal2025). The legal mechanisms governing both domains—whether the Dublin Regulation concentrating asylum burdens on first-entry Mediterranean states or EMU’s ‘no bailout’ rules (Article 125 2016 TFEU) enforcing austerity on debtors—create responsibility-sharing arrangements that systematically concentrate vulnerability at the EU periphery and place disproportionate burdens on border and debtor economies (Léonard and Kaunert Reference Léonard and Kaunert2021). This institutional design does not represent a failure of integration logic; rather, it reveals integration’s success in creating frameworks that distribute benefits to core European states as well as among the small number of elites in the EU peripheries whose politico-economic agendas align with Brussels-backed projects, while externalizing costs onto marginalized populations, black peoples within Europe, and communities in Southern member states and third countries.
The EU economic policy frames peripheral debt crises as fiscal irresponsibility, warranting austerity, while core surpluses remain unscrutinized, operating through a sophisticated linguistic and procedural apparatus that renders certain economies as threats requiring discipline and others as models requiring emulation (Emejulu and Bassel Reference Emejulu and Bassel2018; Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou, Hozic and True2016, Reference Agathangelou2019). The categorization of states as “responsible” fiscal actors or “profligate” debtors creates hierarchies of deserving and undeserving states whose economic legitimacy depends on perceived alignment with ordoliberal principles and creditor interests (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2019), much as the securitization of migration discourse categorizes migrants as “genuine refugees,” “bogus asylum seekers,” or “economic immigrants” based on alignment with European labor market needs and security interests. The EU engagement with peripheral economies through bailout mechanisms and the ESM systematically outsources adjustment costs onto debtor states like Greece, Spain and Italy while maintaining creditor decision-making power over fiscal flows. In a parallel way the EU engagement with third countries through bilateral compacts and memoranda of understanding outsources border control, shifting humanitarian responsibilities onto resource-constrained states while maintaining European decision-making power over migration flows (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou, Hozic and True2016; Léonard and Kaunert Reference Léonard and Kaunert2021). This paradox—European institutions proclaiming convergence and human rights while disciplining Southern citizens and other racialized populations of the South—reveals tensions in a project that claims universal values yet perpetuating economic and racialized exclusions. Integration succeeds by distributing benefits to white core states and peripheral elites, while externalizing costs to the racialized South/third countries, naturalizing colonial discipline through equivalences like “profligate debtors” = “bogus migrants” (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelouforthcoming b).
EU Exclusions and the Co-Constitution of Regulatory Imperialism and the Global Order
Scholarship using a liberal institutional lens positions the EU as for supranational technocrats and polyarchic citizensFootnote 1 (Bermeo Reference Bermeo2016; Lelieveldt and Princen Reference Lelieveldt and Princen2023; Schmitter and Karl Reference Schmitter and Karl1991; Vachudova Reference Vachudova2021), critically overlooking its regulatory imperialist logic (Hernández Reference Hernández2020) that empowers executives exploiting integration for national gains. This approach simultaneously alienates traditional authoritarian nationalists (TANs), who emphasize national sovereignty, cultural homogeneity, and traditional values, while favoring green alternative libertarians (GALs) (cosmopolitans), who support open borders, cultural diversity, and transnational cooperation (Hooghe et al. Reference Houghe2024). These two groups represent opposite poles of a new political cleavage (transnational divide) that has restructured party competition in Europe, focusing on cultural rather than traditional left–right economic issues. GALs’ Euroscepticism underscores the EU’s elitist tilt, serving high-education globalists over low-skill nationals (Bermeo Reference Bermeo2016; Schmitter and Karl Reference Schmitter and Karl1991).
Scholarship on Europe’s normative power (Keuleers et al. Reference Keuleers, Fonck and Keukeleire2016; Smith Reference Smith2015) frames the EU as a liberal actor for global publics who support enlargement by including candidates such as Ukraine, and partners promoting human rights and openness against China or US shifts (Matthijs and Tocci Reference Matthijs and Tocci2026). For example, the Council of the EU (2026) reinforces strategic autonomy for liberal states amid multipolarity. Yet populism fragments this vision, demanding the EU reconcile elite preferences with societal legitimacy (Mondon and Winter Reference Mondon and Winter2019; Keuleers et al. Reference Keuleers, Fonck and Keukeleire2016; Smith Reference Smith2015).
Race and racism scholarship reconceptualizes liberal intergovernmentalism. These scholars argue the EU co-constitutes its global power (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelouforthcoming b) and its standing as EU through the technology of race (Lentin Reference Lentin2025; Sheth Reference Sheth2009; Wolfe Reference Wolfe2016), managing racialized “standing reserves,” and transforming racialized bodies into storable flows for white supremacy (Chun et al. Reference Chun, Nakamura and Chow-White2012, 47). Wendy Hui Kyong Chun repurposes Heidegger’s (Reference Heidegger1954) concept of “standing reserves” and argues:
“Intentionally or unintentionally, race too, understood as a set of visible or invisible genetic characteristics, is a mode of revealing that renders everyone into a set of traits that are stored and transmitted; and also, race is then seen as what allows man to endure through time as a set of unchanging characteristics” (Chun et al. Reference Chun, Nakamura and Chow-White2012, 47–8).
In Chun’s view, race, as technology, transforms racialized bodies into reserves, ensuring white supremacy’s endurance, reducing people to interchangeable inputs for capital/media power (e.g., Black bodies as consumable labor). Chun’s work and her idea of standing reserves expose how liberal integration (Moravcsik Reference Moravcsik1997, Reference Moravcsik1998; Lelieveldt and Princen Reference Lelieveldt and Princen2023) is a racial imaginary and framing of the EU for white subjects. Fortress Europe mechanizes bodies as storable flows enabling race technologies to turn into extractive machineries of the peripheries for core sovereignty (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2004, Reference Agathangelou, Hozic and True2016, Reference Agathangelou2019, Reference Agathangelouforthcoming a; Chun et al. Reference Chun, Nakamura and Chow-White2012; Heidegger Reference Heidegger1954).
Neo-racism scholarship demonstrates that biological exclusion is recoded as cultural differences (i.e., Muslims/Roma/Africans) and incommensurable threats. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein theorize this European racism as “neo-racism” or “racism without race,” noting a shift from 19th-century biological determinism to cultural differentialism, where “others” such as immigrants, Roma, and Muslims are excluded not as inferior races but as incommensurable cultures threatening national homogeneity (Balibar and Wallerstein Reference Balibar and Wallerstein1991, 53–6). This sustains capitalism by displacing class antagonisms onto ethnic frontiers, undermining the social contract’s promise of universal citizenship. Constitutions proclaiming equal rights become tools for bourgeois hegemony, as native workers are racialized against migrant “proletarians” forging “fictive ethnicity” (Balibar and Wallerstein Reference Balibar and Wallerstein1991, 93–6). In Europe, racism articulates nationalism’s contradictions, the universalist pretensions masking hierarchies, making it a “total social phenomenon” (Balibar and Wallerstein Reference Balibar and Wallerstein1991, 49) of violence, and exclusion, reproduced beyond decolonization via the importation of postcolonial workers. Thus, the EU is imagined to appear to be for dominant white classes/nations naturalizing a form of white sovereignty as destiny through exclusion (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelouforthcoming a; Marriott Reference Marriott2018). Enlargement racializes Eastern peripheries as “not-quite-white” against the circulating and dominant idea of liberal universalism engendered as whiteness, sustaining capital through racial alienation (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2004; Balibar and Wallerstein Reference Balibar and Wallerstein1991; Lelieveldt and Princen Reference Lelieveldt and Princen2023).
The Nazi racial state fused eugenics and welfare for the Aryan purified nation, recoded today as EU universalism. Burleigh and Wippermann (Reference Burleigh and Wippermann1991, 156, 197) show how Nazi Germany subordinated policy, social welfare, eugenics, labor, and war to ensure Aryan purification, excluding “alien races” and “less valuable” Germans from benefits while incentivizing ‘racially fit’ reproduction. The authors reject the modernization theses popular among 1970s-1980s historians positing Nazi Germany as a “functionalist” or “polycratic” modernization project where bureaucracy, welfare state expansion, and infrastructure (Autobahnen, Volkswagen) represented incomplete capitalist development toward liberal democracy, stalled by Hitler’s charismatic irrationality (Niemann and Schmitter Reference Niemann, Schmitter, Wiener and Diez2009; Kershaw Reference Kershaw2000, 69; Burleigh and Wippermann Reference Burleigh and Wippermann1991). For them, such theorizations invert cause–effect. Nazism was a project where social “progress” (e.g., automation and maternity benefits) was fused with eliminatory racialized biopolitics (e.g., the persecution and murder of Roma and Sinti, the sterilization of the “hereditarily ill” and of racially defined groups), providing the analytical model for understanding Europe’s enduring racial governance, sanitized post-1945 into EU universalism (Burleigh and Wippermann Reference Burleigh and Wippermann1991, 305). George Fredrickson traces racism’s evolution from medieval anti-Semitism to Enlightenment hierarchies and scientific racism as Europe’s defining response to “otherness,” adapting “herrenvolk democracy” (whites-only equality) and symbolic racism (postcolonial cultural exclusion) (Fredrickson 2002, 60–70). He argues that postcolonial Europe recodes biological racism as cultural, sustaining white sovereignty through migration control and welfare conditionality—integration for white cores, racialized labor extraction from Global South/Southern and Eastern Europe, with racialized groups positioned as eternal “threats” to homogeneity, not co-citizens.
This scholarship accurately critiques liberal institutionalism as enacted through dominant policies of the EU. The framing of EU integration as the racial state’s supranational inheritor stretches the argument beyond liberal theories (Lelieveldt and Princen Reference Lelieveldt and Princen2023) and suggests the EU is imagined and practiced through multiple practices and policies for white Europeans. The idea of a herrenvolk polity extends Nazi “positive eugenics” (Fredrickson Reference Fredrickson2015, 100) (e.g., single market prosperity) through negative exclusions (e.g., border deaths, Roma evictions). Europe’s enduring racial sovereign logic, from Nazi eugenics to postcolonial exclusion, though riddled with contradictions and tensions (Pendas et al. Reference Pendas, Roseman and Wetzell2017) renders the EU’s integration a supranational extension of white European sovereignty.
Liberal narratives celebrate single market “progress” (modern scientific and technological methods), while obscuring how such practices serve white (modern) sovereignty and the reproduction and regeneration of global capital (Vigneswaran Reference Vigneswaran2020). For example, Fortress Europe’s boundary-making between Europe and the rest has produced 45,000 immigrant deaths, Roma evictions, and capital’s financial experiments such as in Greece (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou, Hozic and True2016, Reference Agathangelou2019). The EU serves as a site imagined for white Europeans, positioning racialized populations as “standing reserves” rather than universal citizens, thus disrupting liberal intergovernmental logics (Chun et al. Reference Chun, Nakamura and Chow-White2012; Lelieveldt and Princen Reference Lelieveldt and Princen2023; Small Reference Small2018). Celebrating modernization without a racial critique obscures how the EU equates social policy with racial policy—deploying “modern” bureaucratic and biopolitical efficiency in financial, immigration, and border regimes to pursue an anti-modern telos of white capital’s utopian autarchy (Teloni and Mantanika Reference Teloni and Mantanika2015; Givens and Maxwell Reference Givens and Maxwell2012; Givens and Case Reference Givens and Case2014).
More recent literature advances the critique of race and racism in the EU by engaging colonialism’s afterlives. Hine et al. (Reference Hine, Keaton and Small2009) substantiate Balibar and Wallerstein’s (Reference Balibar and Wallerstein1991) colonialism-racism articulation through Black Europe’s longue durée. They argue that from Roman-era Africans to colonial tirailleurs and postwar labor migration, Blacks embody Europe’s internal colony, racialized as eternal sojourners despite their possession of formal citizenship (Otele Reference Otele2020). Blacks’ hypervisibility through policing and banlieues shows how EU integration serves white normativity rather than diaspora co-ownership. Colonial extraction comes in the form of recruiting black soldiers to fight Europe’s wars or domestics for reproductive labor, now morphed into modern care sector reserves. Race does not merely divide workers but constitutes Europeanness as white property, with Black contributions funding white welfare without reciprocity (Harris Reference Harris1993).
Kinnvall (Reference Kinnvall2016) concretizes Balibar and Wallerstein’s internal racism at the EU scale, by arguing that postcolonial anxieties fuel bordering practices that racialize Muslim/migrant flows as ethno-cultural threats. This positions the EU as a site of contestation for white ontological security, reviving imperial civilizing missions through biometric elimination. Loftsdóttir (Reference Loftsdóttir2018a; Reference Loftsdóttir2018b) grounds this in Iceland’s supposed exotic periphery, showing how crisis revives Viking purity against “polluting” migrants, with mobility hierarchies commodifying Eastern women. His work allows us to expand Balibar’s and Wallerstein’s core-periphery framework to reveal EU enlargement as racial buffering, where “global citizens” (imagined as whites) extract from “unwanted” racialized labor, naturalizing colonial hierarchies internally.
This literature expands the analysis of who the EU is for by acknowledging white supremacy as a global project whose making and unmaking depends on EU policies, programs, and narratives. These produce racial hierarchies through ostensibly race-neutral mechanisms, extending colonial logics of dominance and extraction beyond overt biological racism into modern governance structures. Such projects create newer border regimes that simultaneously externalize violence, racializing migrants as “cultural threats,” while securing whites’ ontological security (Kinnvall Reference Kinnvall2016). The “underlying structure of these discourses is that of asymmetry and dominance” (Horký-Hlucháň and Kratochvíl Reference Horký-Hlucháň and Kratochvíl2014, 265, 256). They project a civilizational superiority to justify white moral hegemony, pitting racialized white workers against diversity threats and deflecting class critique (Meer Reference Meer2019; Merlingen Reference Merlingen2007).
Italian feminist theorists have systematically centralized race and demonstrated how countries of the South serve as critical sites for understanding race as Europe’s constitutive fault line (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2004; Giuliani Reference Giuliani2014; Pandolfi Reference Pandolfi and Schneider1998). Following their lead, our special issue illuminates race and ethnicity in Europe through “the Southern question,” where post-unification Northern elites racialize Southerners as biologically deviant or culturally inferior Others (Pandolfi Reference Pandolfi and Schneider1998, 4). Pandolfi (Reference Pandolfi and Schneider1998, 286) portrays “two Italies” as rhetorical symbols of ethnic failure, revealing internal Orientalism that mirrors Europe’s broader construction of hierarchical racial boundaries (Escafré-Dublet Reference Escafré-Dublet2019). This internal racialization extends outwards. Italy’s colonialism in Eritrea and Ethiopia positioned Italy as a microcosm of European imperialism. We go further by critiquing the Italiano Negro trope, which equates Southerner Europeans with colonial anti-Black imaginaries to forge a unified white identity (Giuliani Reference Giuliani2014). The Southern question, we argue, enacts Orientalism as a global racialized technology that forges white and “white but not quite” identities grounded in anti-Blackness (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2004: 23, Reference Agathangelouforthcoming a; Ackah Reference Ackah2011; Pandolfi Reference Pandolfi and Schneider1998).
As Wekker (Reference Wekker2016, 4) notes, “No one colonises innocently; no one colonises with impunity.” Too often, we use our criticisms of the international order to condemn the current Trump administration as exceptional. The goal of the articles in this collection is to refocus intellectual energies toward engaging with multiple instantiations of global performances, while simultaneously grappling with the processes, practices, institutions, and collectives that enact violence on certain groups and consolidate specific forms of power--all in the name of regulatory imperialism. We call for a research agenda that is thematically focused on Europe’s colonialism enacted through racial challenges, whether through migration and financial policies, counter-extremism, or nomatic protections.
While interventions from political economy, feminist studies, critical security studies, and postcolonialism continue to showcase IR’s innovative interdisciplinary potential for analyzing racialized political practices in international studies, commentaries on the racialized violence institutionalized and perpetrated by European states are seldom amassed together in conventional international studies venues. EU investigations remain confined to European studies as area studies, despite EU’s racial dyanmics reflecting systematic legacies of global racial and capitalist ordering. Examining the international through this unconventional IR lens--the EU--should prompt intellectual innovation. Where do European studies and IR analytics converge and diverge?
As Rutazibwa and Shilliam (Reference Rutazibwa and Shilliam2018, 3) argue, Europe’s continued entanglement in complex geopolitics shows “just how hard it is to contain disease, war, poverty and instability within the global South.” What is happening in Europe today “certainly cannot be reduced to an original colonial sin,” yet colonial and imperial histories bind European polities to the global infrastructures of colonialism (Rutazibwa and Shilliam Reference Rutazibwa and Shilliam2018, 3; de Witte Reference de Witte2019). This is especially so as EU states continue to reproduce their citizens’/nation’s character, identity, and socioeconomic status through racialization (Beaman Reference Beaman2017, Reference Beaman2019; Bird and Schmidd Reference Bird and Schmid2025; Çankaya and Mepschen Reference Çankaya and Mepschen2019). Governments engage in international relations by fomenting the socioeconomic and security conditions necessary for the co-production of a racist political order within, outside, and beyond their borders. Transnational racial ideas and practices remain “critical to [both] international and domestic-level perceptions” of policy legitimacy and appropriate political means (Thompson Reference Thompson, Anievas, Manchanda and Shilliam2015, 56; Niang Reference Niang2016; Pham and Shilliam Reference Pham and Shilliam2016). Race operates domestically through excessive state regulation but remains “globally-textured” by international structures of social and economic racial formations (Thompson et al. Reference Thompson, Anievas, Manchanda and Shilliam2015, 55).
Postcolonial and Black thought scholarship in IR has stretched this further (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2021; Agathangelou and Killian Reference Agathangelou and Killian2016, Reference Agathangelou and Killian2021; Agathangelou and Ling Reference Agathangelou and Ling2004, Reference Agathangelou and Ling2009). These works grapple with race, racism, and the EU, emphasizing how white liberal internationalism remains permeated by colonialism. This scholarship highlights how countries like Greece and Yugoslavia and continents like Africa are experimental zones exposing racial capitalism’s operations, demanding IR go beyond area studies to focus on structural whiteness (Council of the EU 2026), gendered extraction (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2019), and white hetero-patriarchal core violence as well as to confront the EU’s geopolitical consolidation as a global power (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou2004; Agathangelou Reference Agathangelouforthcoming a; Sweetapple Reference Sweetapple2018; Houghe 2024; Rutazibwa Reference Rutazibwa2020). For example, Agathangelou (Reference Agathangelou2019) theorizes racism through an IR feminist-postcolonial lens as racial capitalism’s desiring machinery, positioning EU states like Greece as laboratories for global financialization and capital extractivism. Analyzing Greece’s suicide epidemic (36% rise 2008–2012, amid Troika austerity), she frames precarity as a racialized disposability project: “white-but-not-quite” Greeks become biofinancial conduits for capital accumulation. Their self-destruction exposes EU ordoliberalism’s obliteration logic in building global power (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelouforthcoming a). In other words, Agathangelou (Reference Agathangelou2004) argues EU racial capitalism genders peripheries for extraction (see also Balogun and Joseph-Salisbury 2021). Asian and Eastern European women trafficked into sex/domestic labor for Greek elites confirm the EU as white capital’s core, not equality-thus expanding Balibar’s (Reference Balibar, Gupta, James, Maaka, Galabuzi and Andersen2007, 83) neo-racism into fleshly geopolitics.
Similarly, Catherine Baker (Reference Baker2018) applies IR constructivism to reveal race-making in the processes of enlargement. She suggests post-socialist Yugoslavia was positioned as EU’s racial periphery with post-Yugoslav states racialized as Europe’s “internal other,” white-but-backward Slavs/Balkan Muslims, and managed via EU accession conditionality, echoing colonial civilizing missions. Racism, Baker argues, operates through the naturalization of hierarchy, positioning Eastern Europe as a racial buffer to absorb migration flows (Council of the EU 2026). Baker’s work allows us to expand Balibar and Wallerstein’s core-periphery by showing EU integration as a racial technology, whitening aspirants through disciplined violence (Lentin Reference Lentin2025).
Olivia Rutazibwa (Reference Rutazibwa2010, 212) deploys a postcolonial IR analytic to unmask the EU’s “ethical intervener” self-image. For example, the Africa-EU Joint Strategy promises partnership but reinforces race/ism as capitalism’s infrastructure, “hidden in plain sight” (Rutazibwa Reference Rutazibwa2020, 231). She says EU aid/security pacts are not benefiting Africa but are extraction mechanisms of African resources/labor while externalizing border projects (e.g., Libya deals). In a sense, the deployment of racism by the EU is a way of denying decolonization, thus co-constituting white normative power, with Africa the eternal pupil, naturalizing EU strategic autonomy (Merlingen Reference Merlingen2007). By the same token, authors in Rutazibwa and Shilliam’s (Reference Rutazibwa and Shilliam2018) edited work theorize postcolonial politics, showing how the EU engenders white sovereignty by managing the Global South as the sacrificial periphery rather than as a coequal partner. Otherwise stated, the Global South is the pivotal developmental and experimental object in ensuring Europe’s geopolitical aims.
Who is the EU for? A Decolonial Radical Rethinking
The question “Who is the EU for?” demands radical rethinking. A decolonial analytic that grapples with the EU’s globality drawing on Frantz Fanon (Reference Fanon1963; Reference Fanon1967) and David Marriott (Reference Marriott2017; Reference Marriott2018), as articulated by Agathangelou (Reference Agathangelouforthcoming a, Reference Agathangelouforthcoming b), demonstrates that the EU is not a mere technocratic consolidation serving polyarchic citizens or economic elites but an enactment of colonial sovereignty that ensures racial capital’s global supremacy where anti-Blackness constitutively limits politics itself. This analysis sheds light on EU mechanisms, such as ESM surveillance, Frontex operations, Multiannual Financial Framework conditionality, and the EU’s seven-year budget enforcing fiscal discipline, as planetary enactments of colonial and nègre violence. These institutions depend on fabricated racial schemas that retrojectively claim to found the EU’s globality while continuously reinventing racial capitalism. Agathangelou shows how the EMU, the EU’s framework for economic and monetary integration among eurozone states, subjected Southern states to asymmetric shocks. This enabled Northern states like Germany to channel surpluses exceeding €200 billion annually through Southern extraction (i.e., Greece), protecting the Deutsche Bank and corporations while redirecting development toward digitalization, green technologies epidermalizing Mediterranean bodies as biofinancial disposables (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelou, Hozic and True2016, Reference Agathangelou2019; Lapavitsas Reference Lapavitsas2019; Varoufakis Reference Varoufakis2023).
Biometric hotspots linked to 45,000 Mediterranean deaths reenact colonial anthropometry by registering and scanning Mediterranean migrant bodies, converting deaths into datafied labor flow management that operationalizes epidermal disposability (Léonard and Kaunert Reference Léonard and Kaunert2021). Post-Yugoslav states buffer racialized migration for German automotive supply chains (Baker Reference Baker2018), and Multiannual Financial Framework conditionality rewards Spain’s and Portugal’s debt convergence below 100 percent of GDP with over €70 billion in Recovery Funds while freezing Hungary’s more than €20 billion in cohesion funds (Regulation 2020/2092) for failing to ensure migration flows. Each mechanism fuses state sovereignty with capital’s racial choreography.
Reading Fanon through Marriott, Agathangelou (Reference Agathangelou2024, Reference Agathangelou2025) challenges the positive/negative Manichean dialectics haunting integration scholarship, revealing anti-Blackness as non-ontological filiation rather than integrable lack, a shifting founding limit collapsing Europe’s fantasy of linear (universal) progress (Marriott Reference Marriott2018). The EU exists for the protection and security and reproduction of white economic elites and polyarchic citizens and against the Black’s/slave’s constitutive yet mobile death-in-life animating colonial sovereignty-capital. ESM surveillance reenacts nègre impossibility as the grounding of Greek disposability, Frontex collapses humanitarianism into necropolitics protecting labor markets, and Multiannual Financial Framework conditionality scripts temporal mastery funneling public funds to corporate competitiveness.
Rethinking “Who is the EU for?” through this lens demands decolonial invention beyond comprador intermediaries. Decolonial rupture names Fanon’s tabula rasa, a violent break that shatters colonial structures through the wretched’s violence, depetrifying the colonized from epidermal dehumanization into Blackness’s poetics of abyssal dissolution without ontological closure (Fanon Reference Fanon1967; Marriott Reference Marriott2014). As Marriott (Reference Marriott2018) argues, reading Fanon, invention emerges not as dialectical resolution but as the radical poetics (Ellerbe-Dueck Reference Ellerbe-Dueck2011a, Reference Ellerbe-Dueck, Armbruster and Meinhof2011b), plunging subjects into libidinal and esthetic voids, rupturing anti-Blackness (Emejulu and Sobande Reference Emejulu and Sobande2019). Rather than reforming EU integration’s comprador relays—SI, GAL cosmopolitans, TAN nationalists—we demand, as Fanon argues, yielding to this collective void, negating its racial-capitalist infrastructure by inventing planetary filiation beyond the EU’s Manichean globality (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelouforthcoming a, Reference Agathangelouforthcoming b; Draghi Reference Draghi2025; Rutazibwa Reference Rutazibwa2020; Stokes Reference Stokes2025).
Knowledge Production and Worldmaking Futures: Synthesis and Stakes
As editors of this special issue, we have systematically gathered research on racialization across the EU to outline a coherent research schema that demonstrates how political and security activities within the EU engender colonial and racialized legacies of the international as global dominant power and order.
The special issue has four key objectives: (1) to investigate how and why different EU states reproduce their citizens’/nation’s character, identity, and socioeconomic status through racialization; (2) to catalyze innovative examinations of how different policies of European states either individually or collectively reflect an international disposition systemized by racialized practices, institutions, or ways of knowing the world; (3) to explore new expertise fostering cross-national examinations of the diverse structural processes in EU political expression, whereby existing differentiations between EU citizens and racial Others become hierarchized, solidified, and communicated alongside notions of exclusion, subjugation, and difference; and (4) to collectively disseminate research around European politics, promoting a more global understanding of race relations in Europe and their interconnectivity with international politics elsewhere.
Our collection highlights the urgency of adopting new perspectives for addressing state-led efforts to safeguard civilians and to steer and accelerate a nation’s socioeconomic recovery, preparedness, and resilience in the face of global insecurities. We offer scholarship that encourages critical thinking about human rights and security in relation to the lingering racial privileges and unearned advantages that pervade EU societal relations, norms, and institutions, and legal practice. The insights gleaned from the analyses extend beyond the geography of the EU and its supranational membership, speaking to dynamics at play in liberal democracies, where conditions of politics and exclusion are shaped by the politics of racialization.
The stakes are high. Lives, dignity, and belonging are contested daily, with border deaths, deportations, and social marginalization signaling who is protected and who is expendable within the supposedly imagined universal European project. Ethnically and racially, the current order foregrounds white sovereignty as capital even as it claims to defend universal norms. This creates political cleavages pitting nationalism and anti-globalist stances against cosmopolitan liberalism, with both sides seeking to maintain a racialized and asymmetrical hierarchy. The consequence is a Europe where citizenship, rights, and social welfare are unevenly distributed along racial lines, making decolonial, Black thought, anti-racist, and postcolonial perspectives essential for reimagining Europe as an inclusive, democratic project that transcends white supremacy and imperial legacies (Icaza Reference Icaza, Woons and Weier2017).
Outline of the Special Issue
Our special issue begins with Rosa Maryon’s article, “‘It’s Like a Prison’, which explores how racial capitalism offers a crucial lens for analyzing EU–Tunisia relations.” Maryon argues that Tunisia’s security cooperation with its supranational external actors is linked to a system maintaining a racialized and violent model of capitalist accumulation. She demonstrates this is a purposeful relationship: the EU is not just turning a blind eye to Tunisia’s violent border regime but is also interacting with and reinforcing anti-Black racism via its externalization policies. Building on a research agenda comprising studies of authoritarian neoliberalism and racial capitalism, Maryon offers a timely conceptual foundation for her empirical research, including interviews conducted with Tunisian journalists, academics, NGO workers, political elites, and foreign diplomats. By spotlighting the entanglements of racialized bordering practices across the Mediterranean, she demonstrates how the themes of racialized hierarchies, a political economy of racialized labor, and the presence of racialized policing illustrate the complicity of the EU amid numerous mechanisms of migration control that define Tunisia’s border-security regime.
The second article, “Who is Disposable? The Making and Re-Making of the ‘Bad’ Migrant at Europe’s Borders,” co-authored by Gemma Bird and Davide Schmid, aligns with Maryon’s call to evaluate the racialized and economic forces in EU migration management. Bird and Schmid adopt a critical political economy perspective that posits the categorization of migration in EU policymaking and discourse is changing, and they query what this process communicates to audiences concerning who is and is not constructed as belonging in Europe. They identify discursive and symbolic figures who constituting the “economic migrant” and the “asylum seeker” in current European border and migration affairs, pointing to a reconfiguration of the categories of migration, prompted by corresponding changes in the political economy of Europe. They further allege that the fluid nature of these political caricatures unsettles established moral binaries of “legal” and “illegal” migration normalized in policy discourse. Their analysis of EU and member state documents, NGO and activist reports, and media coverage between 2018–2024 yields innovative insights into these categories. Their perspective is grounded in a multifaceted theoretical framework that centers racial capitalism, alongside concepts of disposability and grievability, to illuminate the violent and dehumanizing behaviors of key EU agencies, such as the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex).
Building on Bird and Schmid’s racial capitalist approach to EU studies, the third contribution, Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal’s “The European Union’s Neighbourhood Policy and the Unacknowledged Mediterranean Colour Line,” assesses existing studies of EU foreign policy. Domínguez de Olazábal employs critical discourse analysis attuned to the logics of racial capitalism to examine the discursive constructions in policy text(s), their interdiscursivity, and their geopolitical positioning. She focuses on two documents in the EU’s 2021 New Agenda for the Mediterranean-the Joint Communication:Renewed Partnership and the accompanying Joint Staff Working Document: Economic and Investment Plan for the Southern Neighbours—showing their digitized trade and environmental aims. She situates these within her theorized Mediterranean rendition of the DuBoisean color line, defined as the racialized frontier separating Europe from its Southern neighbors. Through this anti-imperial framework, she shows how EU policy dialog enforces hierarchies of belonging and exclusion via trade asymmetries, security partnerships, and epistemic regimes that position the Southern Mediterranean, sub-Saharan Africa, and the wider Arab world as territories of populations requiring continued colonial intervention and control.
The fourth contribution, Myriam Fotou’s “Racial and Colonial Aphasia in EU Border Security: The Case of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum,” builds on analyses of EU migration management by centering the EU’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum. Fotou deploys a theoretical framework that foregrounds discussions of colonial and racial aphasia, highlighting the political purpose of active forgetting in European migration politics. She demonstrates how the EU policymakers continuously introduce legal and discursive templates stemming from a longstanding history of colonial governance, producing neo-imperial policy modalities for governing unwanted mobility in Europe. Drawing on Mayblin and Turner, Mignolo, and Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Fotou historicizes current border practices within a broader framework, revealing rhetorical evidence of coloniality in the EU’s Crisis Regulation and International Partnerships Pillar. By juxtaposing the criminalization of migration with colonial-era legislation, she shows how present-day EU emergency conventions echo mechanisms once used to impose political order on Europe’s colonial subordinates through legible, legal, and legitimate violence. By tackling representations of the EU humanitarian-development-cooperation frameworks as progressive, Fotou offers an important alternative reading of EU partnerships, migration clauses, and commitments for the Global South.
In their article, “Contingent Safe Waters: Aesthetic Dissensus between Metaphor and the Whitening of Russo-Ukrainian War’s Refugees in the Spanish Press,” João Raphael da Silva and Marcelle Trote Martins shift the focus to another pressing issue of our time: the continued politics of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Zooming in on the geopolitical dynamic of Spanish media outlets and the politics of their representation of refugees fleeing the largest conflict in continental Europe since World War II, da Silva and Martins link concepts of off-whiteness (Baker et al. Reference Baker, Iacob, Imre and Mark2024) with Orientalism (Said Reference Said1978) to reveal a distinct racialization of Oriental European others in a country’s deployment of specific words and images to elicit support for their migration. By way of descriptive content analysis and visual framing using LexisNexis and NVivo, da Silva and Martins investigate and code image and textual coverage of Russia’s attack on Ukraine in Spanish newspapers, guided by Jacques Rancière’s concept of a “sentence-image.” They invite politics readers into a non-Anglo-centric investigation of race, media, and political construction, problematizing how mass communication rhetoric is used to humanize some asylum seekers over others in a humanitarian crisis.
The next article examines the exceptional dynamics of racialization in national discourse in less-centralized EU regions. In “Being Roma in the European Union: A Tale of Racism, Racialization and Deservedness,” Andreja Zevnik and Andrew Russell use critical race theory to show how numerous EU policies institutionally sustain Roma racialization. They offer a critical discourse analysis of the EU Anti-Racism Action Plan 2020–2025, the EU Roma Strategic Framework 2020–2030, and the European Parliament’s Resolution from June 19, 2020 on the anti-racist protests following the killing of George Floyd. They suggest these key policy events represent a critical moment for discussing the situation of the Roma in the EU. Informed by the work of Stuart Hall, Alana Lentin, and Paul Gilroy, among others, Zevnik and Russell argue for examining the marginalization of the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe, a region frequently imagined to be racially and ethnically homogenous, drawing attention to the regionally specific complexities of economic and cultural difference. Underscoring the killing of Stanislav Tomáš, a Romani man who died in Teplice after police officers restrained him and knelt on his neck, Zevnik and Russell prompt readers to reflect on what it means to be white in Central and Eastern Europe and whether Roman receive protection under current EU racial equality measures.
In the concluding article, “Danish vs. Muslim: (Re)Imagining the Citizen through Terror Law Prosecution,” Kerstin Bree Carlson offers a race-focused analysis of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). She draws attention to the law’s principal role in constructing and preserving colonial relations. More specifically, she examines the Danish terror law jurisprudence, using the Danish Supreme Court’s 2018 determination to strip Adam Johanssen, a dual Danish and Tunisian national, of citizenship on terrorism charges. Situating her research within citizenship scholarship and critical legal studies, Carlson interrogates the ECtHR doctrine’s misapplication by the Danish Supreme Court, which legitimizes law’s capacity to construct rather than merely reify liberal rights. Observing a national instrumentalization of supranational law, Carlson offers a novel paradigm linking citizenship revocation to racialized notions of individual state belonging, challenging wider ideals presupposed by EU lawmaking. Carlson points to the structurally violent consequences of legal frameworks grounded in blood or soil citizenship, which institutionalize racism under the guise of concerns about foreign fighters and national belonging.
All contributions in this special issue converge on a common answer to the question “who is the EU for?” The EU emerges as a colonial–racial formation that co-produces sovereign global power and a particular kind of white subject, mobile, rights-bearing, and capital-possessing, through processes of racialization. European integration is not merely institutional or economic. It is simultaneously epistemic and material, generating sociotechnical orders in which governance architectures and subjectivities are mutually constituted. Integration is itself a racializing project that stabilizes a normative European white subject while rendering others governable through differentiated racialization, under conditions that allow this hierarchy to appear as universal, neutral, and technical.
Across policy domains, this co-production is consistently visible. Financial governance mechanisms such as the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) discipline peripheral economies like Greece through debt surveillance while extending relative leniency to systemically central states such as Italy and Spain, a racialization that secures financial stability for European elites and creditor institutions. Migration governance similarly produces racialized hierarchies of humanity, from Temporary Protection’s exceptionalization of Ukrainian refugees in contrast to the containment of Syrians, to the Roma Framework’s culturalized inclusion, and Frontex border practices that render certain migrants disposable. Externalization regimes in Tunisia, including carceral arrangements often described as prison-like containment infrastructures, alongside the Mediterranean colour line, selective solidarities, and citizenship revocations, consolidate an imperial ordering. These regimes are underpinned by contemporary imperial technologies in which biometrics function as a continuation of anthropometry and externalization echoes the logics of the encomienda, jointly sustaining global racial capitalism through the differential valuation of life, mobility, and rights.
All contributions collectively demonstrate that EU integration is inseparable from global racial capitalism and its imperial infrastructures, including Tunisia’s carceral migration spaces, Frontex practices of disposability, and biometric governance systems that sort and regulate populations. Instruments such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), AI Act, and Digital Services Act extend this ordering outward by shaping global data and governance infrastructures while displacing enforcement, extraction, and border violence onto racialized populations within and beyond Europe. The stakes for European studies are therefore profound. Persisting with race-neutral accounts of integration reproduces a technocratic naturalization that obscures these colonial formations, rendering EU governance as neutral rather than historically produced. A decolonial analytic allows us to reframe integration through racialized worldmaking, foregrounding how exclusions are constitutive, and how universality is continuously manufactured through differential exposure, externalization, and disposability. This analytic enable us to trace the EU through Fanon’s notion of Manichean sociogeny, thereby reorienting the field toward racialized lifeworlds that confront these structures of global power challenging simultaneously white teleological narratives of progress (Fanon 1963). EU studies can no longer then be understood as merely “EU studies,” but must instead be situated within a broader analytic of race, racism, and coloniality. For EU studies of race and racism, this requires moving beyond descriptive critique toward invention by refusing the comprador relays that sustain anti-Blackness and by enabling an analysis of epidermal disposability from Greek debt regimes to Mediterranean “hotspots” as active world-authoring processes rather than peripheral crises (Agathangelou Reference Agathangelouforthcoming a, Reference Agathangelouforthcoming b). This special issue politicizes integration scholarship and European Studies by demonstrating how colonial logics are enacted through EU racializations while opening a space to imagine “real leaps” (Fanon Reference Fanon1967) toward decolonial futures beyond what Agathangelpou (forthcoming a) calls Europe’s globally derealizing order of substantive globality defining it to be “a global formation in which Europe produces the dominant categories through which the global becomes intelligible and governable, while simultaneously rendering other lifeworlds partially legible only through their translation into Eurocentric epistemic and institutional frameworks.”Footnote 2
Acknowledgments
This special issue is the long-awaited outcome of a workshop funded by the International Studies Association (ISA), held on Tuesday, March 14, 2023, and co-organized and led by Anna M. Agathangelou, Amal Abu-Bakare, and Christian Kaunert at the ISA 2023 pre-Annual Convention in Montréal, Quebec. As 2023 ISA Research Workshop Grants Recipients, we endeavored to collaborate on a scholastic writing project with the following workshop attendees: Olivia Rutazibwa, Gemma Bird, Rosa Maryon, Andreja Zevnik, Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal, Joao Raphael Da Silva, Kerstin Carlson, Myriam Fotou, and ourselves as editors. We extend our gratitude to all past and current contributors to this special issue. We also thank Aida Hozic, who attended our workshop and provided feedback, as well as the many friends and colleagues who reviewed our grant proposals and were part of the peer-review process. Finally, we would like to express our sincere thanks to the editors of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien and Christopher Towler, for their patience, guidance, and support.
Funding statement
Part of this research was also support to Anna M. Agathangelou “Migration, security and liberal democratic politics in the European context” supported by the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada Number of Grant 410-2009-1736.
Competing interests
None.
Anna M. Agathangelou is a Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto and an expert in the study of gender, women, and international politics. Her areas of expertise are time and temporality in global politics, the body, time and ecology, international feminist political economy, and feminist/postcolonial and decolonial thought. She is the co-director of Global Change Institute, Cyprus, and was a visiting fellow in the Program of Science, Technology and Society at John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard (2014–2015).
Amal Abu-Bakare is a lecturer in the politics of race and decolonial studies at the University of Liverpool. She received her PhD in International Politics from Aberystwyth University. Her current research profile remains centered on using anti-colonial IR theory to explore how North American and European political/security institutions continue to empower racially configured exclusions and terror.
Christian Kaunert is Professor of International Security at Dublin City University, Ireland. He is also Professor of Policing and Security, as well as Director of the International Centre for Policing and Security at the University of South Wales. In addition, he is a Jean Monnet Chair, Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, and the Director of the Jean Monnet Network on EU Counterterrorism.
