“When Germany took over the six-month presidency of the [European Union] in 2020, it chose the slogan ‘Making Europe strong again together,’” Hans Kundnani tells us in his new book, Eurowhiteness. “The German government had therefore adopted the Trump administration’s slogan of ‘Make America Great Again’ but, because it now applied to a region rather than a nation, imagined that this would transform its meaning into the opposite of that signified by Trump.”

Indeed, the EU’s supporters often like to claim that the continental bloc is an antidote to nationalism. But Kundnani sees it as something else: a project mutating into a regional polity based on a civilizational identity. This regionalism is not entirely new, drawing on both modern and premodern myths of European cultural homogeneity and racial superiority. But it signals a departure from the postwar civic project — a turn that has accelerated in the last couple of decades, particularly since the Eurozone crisis and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Kundnani labels this new, disturbing, political form “Eurowhiteness.” Crucially, he argues that Eurowhiteness is bolstered not only by the usual suspects of right-wing populism but also a political center that has co-opted its rhetoric, defending a “Christian Europe” or a European “way of life” against outsiders, whether Muslim, Russian, or from countries on Europe’s borders. Each bolsters the other: just as many confirmed pro-Europeans are willing to work with far-right parties, from Warsaw to Rome, these latter have also taken up pro-Europeanism in their identity posturing against the non-European.