by Ferenc Laczó
Growing up as a committed anti-racist in Eastern Europe, I used to think the idea that there can be racism against white people was both false and dangerous. Until I moved to the Netherlands as a student at the dawn of our century, that is, where I soon discovered that negative stereotypes about East Europeans—stereotypes that assign them lower value and ought therefore to be qualified as racist—are something of a commonplace here, just like in neighboring West European countries.
As a defender on the Swiss national football team put it so eloquently a few years ago: When my teammates make a mistake, it is because they had a bad day, but when I make one, people say it is because I am Albanian.
Start a conversation about what people know about Eastern Europe—which is something I do regularly at the beginning of my university courses in the Netherlands these days, having become a lecturer in the meantime—and such stereotypes tend to surface almost immediately. I have heard students make statements such as “East Europeans are notoriously corrupt,” “East Europeans are particularly good at hard physical labor,” or even “East Europeans are especially violent.”
Based on the frequency with which I have encountered them across the years, such anti-East European statements appear to belong among the few “socially acceptable” forms of racism in Europe these days.
I feel almost embarrassed to even raise this issue. Compared to the open hate, discrimination, and physical violence that other people experience in West and East European societies, these often quite subtle experiences of ours may well appear trivial.
However, they do translate into persistent discrimination on the nominally common European labor market—something that many West Europeans still seem blissfully unaware of. They have also translated on the political level into shortsighted European Union policies to design enlargement—or even, and revealingly enough, accession—policies from a position of unquestioned superiority, instead of hoping to co-create something new and more fitting together with citizens of the East European countries in question. Still, while the term itself has rarely served as an object of self-identification, the racialization of East Europeans has to be qualified as rather ambiguous.
After all, Eastern Europe is that part of Europe which may be included or excluded, dependent on the context and the moment. Just think of Ukrainians who had been the most forgotten large European nation in our time only to suddenly become the great heroes and most tragic victims of European resistance to imperialist aggression.
I have nonetheless kept track of such remarks from students across the years because my job profile obliges me to try to integrate Eastern Europe into wider discussions of Europe—and quite simply because I consider it my moral duty to fight harmful stereotypes and create spaces for more equitable encounters within what we loftily call the European project.
Over years of trying and often failing at such discursive integration, I also came to recognize that there is a deeper problem. My classes on Eastern Europe are typically taken by interested students from West European countries most of whom have had apparently been exposed to some 15 years of education without ever being asked to consider that there is this “other Europe” too (another all too suggestive colloquial expression, of course), with all its fascinating cultures and historically conditioned values and beliefs, with all its similarities to but also notable differences from Western Europe.
That massive gap in education across large parts of Western Europe amounts to a key reason why Eastern Europe tends to get defined negatively in a second sense too, i.e., defined through what it lacks to be quite like Western Europe.
Clichés I keep on hearing during such introductory discussions include that Eastern Europe is “not as developed,” “not as democratic,” that people there are “not as tolerant,” etc.
My issue with such comparisons is not that they are necessarily factually incorrect, but rather that those who utter them often seem to compare and contrast in order to pass facile judgement. That is to say that in such instances my otherwise well-educated students simply do not care to inquire why Western Europe has become more developed socioeconomically, and what continues to structure its unequal relationship with Eastern Europe—not to mention whether West Europeans have really been the great apostles of peace when acquiring their current global position. We might even hypothesize that in such moments their ignorance manifests itself in presupposing that East Europeans are the ones who are truly ignorant. At the end of such rather disheartening early exchanges, I tell my students that their tutor comes from Eastern Europe too and then ask them to consider how they would relate to what they have just said if they did too.
I am happy to report that young West Europeans can switch gears easily these days and become much more understanding—and that is precisely when learning can truly begin. Some have even said, to their own visible surprise, that they would be outraged.
Those repeated experiences of sudden empathy and intellectual opening have given me enough hope to persevere on this difficult terrain, trying to educate West Europeans about Eastern Europe in an analytical, sufficiently complex and nuanced manner, not least as an antidote to all the negative stereotypes, the harmful clichés, and the downright racist nonsense that still saturate their societies despite the fact that they have been living in a union for some two decades now in which very nearly every second member state may be labelled East European.
Having spent over a decade in a Western European country as a lecturer and being middle aged now, I have also come to grudgingly reconcile myself to the fact that power relations can only be changed incrementally—and that if you come from Eastern Europe, your Europeanness may still be questioned almost any day.
That is perhaps also why people like me struggle so hard to earn their right to be treated as equals—because someone more powerful might just assert rather casually that I made that mistake not because I just had a bad day.
The article was first published in Dutch in de Volkskrant.
Ferenc Laczó is former Co-Managing Editor at the Review of Democracy and is assistant professor with tenure in History at Maastricht University. His main research interests lie in political and intellectual history, modern and contemporary European and global history, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and questions of history and memory.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
