Authors

Discussion

This monograph addresses the hidden dynamics of race within the EU. Brexit supporters’ targeting of Central and Eastern European (CEE) movers was popularly assumed as at odds with the EU project’s foundations based on equality and inclusion. This book dispels that notion. By interrogating the history, wording, assumptions and applications of policies and discourses pertinent to mobility and equality, I argue that the parameters of CEE nationals’ status within the EU have been closely circumscribed, in line with the long-standing western gaze. As the largest group of CEE movers, Poles have been impacted by such rhetoric and policies most significantly. The study shows how EU laws and regulations have systematically rendered CEE nationals precarious, vulnerable to labour exploitation, and subject to racialised discrimination. By addressing fractures within the construct of whiteness that are based on intersection of ethnicity, class, and migrant status, and demonstrating how they shape lived reality of mobility, the book also provides a theoretically nuanced, and politically useful, understanding of contemporary European racisms. 

The book’s first substantive chapter reveals an absence of CEE heritage in discussions of ‘European’ culture, and instances of explicit othering of the east. It traces the economic and political dynamics of the relationship between the EU and CEE states–from before, to the aftermath of the fall of communism, and under discrete pre-accession agreements—to expose the west’s misuse of its bargaining power to shape Eastern Enlargement policies to economically benefit western financial institutions and EU-15 states. This process was complemented by EU rhetoric othering the CEE region as in need of civilising. Chapter 3 exposes how both mobility and equality policies and discourses, by both EU institutions and EU-15 states, have been further normalising CEE nationals’ second-class citizenship within the EU. The chapter looks at CEE nationals’ experience of mobility, and at the unequal impact of CEE mobility on the CEE and EU-15 regions. Chapter 4 presents a detailed analysis of CEE nationals’ experiences and positioning in pre-Brexit UK, as an illustrative case study to bolster arguments developed in the preceding chapters, drawing on close analysis of race discrimination cases within the employment context. In the final chapter, the book’s contributions to critical whiteness studies and postcolonial theory are brought to the forefront.