Race

Abstract

This chapter explores anti-colonial whiteness. It argues that postwar global decolonization offered a pathway to international status for Eastern Europeans and thus an escape from their historical subordination as lesser whites defined by their lack of imperial power. Adopting the postwar consensus that the world consisted of three races, Communists often presented themselves as the morally superior white Europeans. The racial problem had been solved at home, Communists argued, and their commitment to fighting continued discrimination wherever capitalist imperialism reproduced it placed them in the anti-racist avant-garde. This chapter brings together the contemporary voices of Eastern European politicians, activists and writers, alongside those of the Chinese, and Africans, to explore such declarations. Both friends and enemies were often critical. They argued that such claims were cynically used to hide the realities of domestic anti-Semitism, or were merely performative, a product of only superficially hidden European desires for power still expressed through white saviour fantasies based on imperial nostalgia. Nevertheless, as long as an anti-racism motivated in part by an imperially inspired longing for status could be hitched to a powerful and appealing anti-colonial world project, Communist Eastern Europe’s allies could discern its progressive potential. As soon as Third World alliances ceased to be perceived, from the late 1970s, as a route to global influence, commitments to forging a superior anti-colonial whiteness collapsed. More and more voices in Eastern Europe contended that a ‘multi-coloured socialist internationalism’ had degraded the region, the status of which would be recovered through a return to a culturally distinct, and racially bordered, white Christian Europe.