Thanks to everyone who replied to our survey of which topics you’d like Free Lunch to cover. The results are now in: “Green industrial policy” and “Surprise me!” prevailed with 29 per cent of the votes each; next came “Inflation and disinflation” with 19 per cent and “Inequality” with 18; and, finally, “Sanctions” with 6. We would love to hear from more of you, so do send any requests/comments/suggestions to freelunch@ft.com. I have already had some good out-of-the-box suggestions that I will try to reply to. Keep them coming.
Concerning the green transition, do take a look at my colleagues’ long read on the new metals superpowers. For today’s Free Lunch, I’ll have to go for “Surprise me!”. Regular readers may recognise the topic, however. A couple of years ago I wrote about Hans Kundnani’s provocative argument that those feeling a European identity are really expressing an exclusionary “ethno-regionalism”, where “European” means “white”. Kundnani has now developed his original article into a book — Eurowhiteness — which pushes the argument further.
In some ways, this has added to its strength. As I wrote back then, I don’t agree with where Kundnani goes, but find many of his points instructive, useful and true. So I recommend both the original article and the book, in which he elaborates on how the motivation for European integration was always in practice intimately linked to that for European dominance. In the words of the book’s most succinct sentence: “For as long as Europeans have thought of themselves as European, they have thought of themselves as being better than the rest of the world.”
Kundnani treats readers to more details about how colonialism dovetailed with pan-Europeanism and reminds us of further crucial but conveniently forgotten facts. For example, that the founders of what is now the EU had vast colonial territories at the moment of the Treaty of Rome — indeed the original community included parts of the African continent through French departements in Algeria — yet Morocco’s later interest in applying was dismissed since it was not in geographical Europe.
His main thesis is, I think, correct: that the redemptive narrative built around the second world war and the Holocaust has served to distract from the actions and attitudes of Europe and Europeans towards the rest of the world. Kundnani is right that “there was never an attempt to make the memory of colonialism a central European foundational memory . . . even as the Holocaust was becoming ‘the core of European identity’, the EU had become a vehicle for imperial amnesia”.
Kundnani comes close to concluding that “European identity” is essentially racist, hence the title of the book, Eurowhiteness, because “Europeanness” excludes non-whites, he argues. This is why he wants us to see Brexit as an opportunity for the UK to better come to terms with its own imperial legacy and multicultural society precisely by becoming less “Eurocentric”.
This I don’t buy. In another recent and important book (thoughtfully reviewed by Stephen Bush here), Kenan Malik points out that racial categories have always been constructed in reaction to otherwise hard-to-justify inequalities. Malik’s most striking point is that the very idea of “whiteness” is a product of the Enlightenment. A world view founded on the basic rational equality of all humans was adopted (perhaps for the first time in history) by societies in which huge inequalities nevertheless remained and where power was wielded to maintain them. Creating categories of the more or less human could rationalise this: racism as massive (and mass) cognitive dissonance reduction.
Malik’s analysis is particularly important for pro-Europeanism, which self-consciously identifies with Enlightenment values. But it also shows the limits of Kundnani’s “eurowhiteness” idea, especially the attempt to use it to rebut accusations that Brexit itself was motivated by xenophobia or racism. In short, “whiteness” refers not to natural facts but to whomever a dominant group happens to choose to exclude at any particular point. If we are going to use the concepts of “whiteness” and racism at all, therefore, we need to count the aggression against Poles and Romanians in Britain around the Brexit referendum as just that, drawing the category of “whiteness” in a way that put them outside. Even if Kundnani’s hopes proved warranted and post-Brexit Britain became more inclusive of its own imperial legacy (the Windrush scandal and the intense political weaponisation of migrant boats are not good omens), doing so by becoming less Eurocentric would only rearrange the perimeter of “whiteness”, not overcome it.
The focus should surely be on the hypocrisy in much pro-Europeanism, a term I wish Kundnani used more. The facts he documents (and a great public service he performs by doing so) show the problem is that pro-Europeanism is not consistent enough. As I wrote in my previous commentary on this, even if European identity is not cosmopolitan, it has universalist elements at its core: the Enlightenment commitment to rationalism, the social market economy and the pooling of sovereignty between previously autonomous units (nation-states). All these can in principle be shared by and with all.
Kundnani complains about the “civilisational mission” contained in pro-European thinking, and of course he is right about the crimes committed in the name of such missions. But if the problem is that pro-Europeans hypocritically restrict access to their “way of life” then surely the remedy is for European identity to practise what it preaches and make the universalism real — what Malik calls “radical” Enlightenment.
That means embracing a narrative that includes, for sure, colonialism by western Europe (as well as central and eastern Europe’s history as victims of Russian colonialism). It also means a great effort at understanding ways of being European that includes a family history of being victims of European crimes, such as the many European citizens with ancestry from former colonies. But it also means welcoming countries outside geographical Europe that aspire to the same values of rational tolerance, social markets and pooled sovereignty into the European project — indeed to encourage those values elsewhere while practising them more consistently ourselves.
If that is not a civilisational project, I don’t know what is. But I also don’t see why it would be a bad thing.
More on the curious weakness in average hours worked
Last month I pointed to the striking weakness in average hours worked across many advanced economies. I suggested this means there is more slack in labour markets than many central bankers would have us believe. One reader wrote to ask if this might just reflect a greater use of part-time work after the pandemic, whether because more people opt for part-time rather than full-time positions or because labour shortages mean businesses must now hire people who never wanted to work full-time in the first place. If so, the fall in average hours worked would be compatible with a tight labour market.
So I took a look, and I think the numbers rule out this possibility. As the charts below show, since the pandemic the share of part-time work in total jobs has fallen both in the US and in the EU and the eurozone:
So I stick to my original view: there is more slack in labour markets than many people think.
Other readables
The link between economic integration and political liberalism is down but not out, I argue in my latest FT column.
Robin Wigglesworth’s brief history of the bond market is the best you will read on the financial product that transformed the world, over and over again.
Sarah O’Connor writes in praise of the “techies” who boost our productivity.
Ed Conway complicates the lazy debate on whether fossil fuel extraction helps with energy security by pointing out that Britain exports almost all its North Sea oil.
Numbers news
China’s consumer prices are deflating.
You are seeing a snapshot of an interactive graphic. This is most likely due to being offline or JavaScript being disabled in your browser.
And trade powerhouse no more? Chinese exports have shrunk 14.5 per cent in dollar terms since last year, and imports by almost as much.
Source: Economy - ft.com
