Hans Kundnani – författare

An alternative account of the EU as a racialised project The European Union is often seen as a cosmopolitan rejection of violent nationalism. Yet the idea of Europe has a long, problematic history—in medieval times, it was synonymous with Christianity; in the modern era, it became associated with ‘whiteness’. Eurowhiteness exposes the EU as a vehicle for imperial amnesia. Narratives of European integration emphasise the lessons of war and the Holocaust, but not the lessons of colonial history. The EU is about power as much as peace—and civic ideas of Europe are being displaced by ethnic and cultural ones. Since the 2015 refugee crisis, whiteness has become even more central to European identity—a troubling new turn in Europe’s long civilisational project. It is time to confront the relationship between ideas of Europe and ideas of race.

One thing above all separated the radical students who demonstrated on the streets of West Berlin and Frankfurt in 1968 from their counterparts in Berkeley or New York. In the US, the baby boomers grew up in the shadow of what Tom Brokaw called the greatest generation. In its place, Germany had the so-called Auschwitz generation. What became known in Germany as the '68 generation' or just the Achtundsechziger had grown up knowing that their mothers and fathers were directly or indirectly responsible for Nazism and in particular for the Holocaust. Germany's 1968 generation did not merely dream of a better world as some of their contemporaries in other countries did; they felt compelled to act to save Germany from itself. It was an all-or-nothing choice: Utopia or Auschwitz. Kundnani shows that the struggle of Germany's '68 generation also had a darker side. Although the 'Achtundsechziger' imagined their struggle against capitalism in West Germany as 'resistance' against Nazism, they also had a tendency to see Auschwitz everywhere and, by using images and metaphors connected with Nazism to describe events in other parts of the world, they relativized Nazism and in particular the Holocaust. Even more disturbingly, despite the anti-fascist rhetoric of the 'Achtundsechziger', there were also anti-Semitic and nationalist currents in the West German New Left that grew out of the student movement. "Utopia or Auschwitz" traces the political journey of Germany's post-war generation and examines the influence that its ambivalent attitude to the Nazi past had on the foreign policy of the 'red-green' government between 1998 and 2005, which included several former members of the student movement like Joschka Fischer. The red-green government's schizophrenic foreign policy, manifested its response to the crises in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, reflected the 1968 generation's ambivalent attitude to the Nazi past.

A 'German Europe' seems to have emerged from the euro crisis. During the last few years, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been compared with Hitler in the European media and on the streets of European capitals. There has been much debate about German 'hegemony' and some have even perceived the emergence of a kind of German 'empire' within Europe. And yet Germany is clearly a different country than it was in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. So is there a new 'German question' and, if so, what is it? In The Paradox of German Power Hans Kundnani explores the transformation of Germany since re-unification in 1990 and puts it in the context of Germany's pre-1945 history. He examines a series of tensions in German foreign policy - between continuity and change, between 'normality' and 'abnormality', between economics and politics, and between Europe and the world - and concludes that the 'German question' has reemerged in geo economic form.