Europeanization as Civilizational Transition from East to West

Abstract

Drawing on an empirical study of gender and sexuality politics in Ukraine, this article interrogates the civilizational and yet unspoken racialization that characterizes Europeanization projects in the context of EU enlargement. Its point of departure is that the boundaries of Europeanness coincide with the boundaries of whiteness in a civilizational frame. It argues that Europeanization involves more than merely the influence of EU policies and values on non-member states, simultaneously marking and unmarking civilizational whiteness. Europeanness is, in this meaning, a quintessential racialized identity marker, even as racial whiteness is unmarked as a ‘natural’ adjacency of the West. This dual mechanism is discussed in terms of racial displacement. More specifically, the article foregrounds how racialized power relations intersect with – while at the same time being obscured by – political instrumentalization of sexual rights and freedoms in ‘transitioning’ processes in Ukraine.

Carrying Europe’s ‘White Burden’, Sustaining Racial Capitalism: Young Post-Soviet Migrant Workers in Helsinki and Warsaw

“…The imagined geography of 'Eastness', which is defined through its backwardness, has been a persistent signifier of the region for centuries, preceding the capitalist/communist divide (Kovačević, 2009;Todorova, 2009). These processes become particularly visible in the contemporary discourses of Europeanization and 'transition', which reproduce existing colonial imaginaries that place the East on a trajectory to progress (Gressgård and Husakouskaya, 2020;Kušić et al, 2019;Kuus, 2004). Semi-peripherality of Eastern Europe thus plays a role in absorbing some of the conflicts between the core and the periphery, 'thus exempting the West from the charges of racism, colonialism, Eurocentrism and Christian intolerance' (Boatcă, 2006: 327).…”

“…Despite not being recognized as fully European by the West, Eastern European states produce and maintain ‘secondary Eurocentrism’, reproducing civilizational narratives and racialized ideas of white Europeanness. Loyalty to Europe has to be continuously demonstrated by those situated within and outside the EU who are constructed as not European enough and as situated right on the civilizational margins of Europeanness (Dzenovska, 2013; El-Tayeb, 2011; Gressgård and Husakouskaya, 2020; Rexhepi, 2018). Today, Eastern Europe plays the role of a buffer to control migration from the continents of Africa and Asia, willing to provide disciplinary governance and defend Europe from Muslim Others in exchange for promises of inclusion in Europe (Rexhepi, 2018).…”

What Makes Middle‐aged Ukrainian Women into “Soviet” Babushki?

“…Another narrative of the book are the ways migrant women cultivate "capitalist selves" vis-a-vis "Soviet mentality." In my view, this line of thinking could benefit from some deep engagement with a body of research that analyses processes of Europeanization in the east of Europe (B€ or€ ocz 2001;Gressg ard and Husakouskaya 2020;Kuus 2004). This scholarly work has critiqued Europeanization and the narrative of transition to capitalism as a civilizational project based on a teleological assumption that former socialist states can gradually be allowed into Western modernity through becoming capitalist and democratic.…”