Race, Nation and Disaffection: a European Question

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Building on his UK ESRC funded project Northern Exposure: Race, Nation and Disaffection in “Ordinary” Towns and Cities after Brexit,* Adrian Favell proposes to sketch a research programme on how race and nation can be positioned at the heart of a new European cleavage over conceptions of population, that has its most dramatic expression in the growing European obsession with “immigration”. European politics in the mid 2020s is a volatile combination of high salience of “visible” immigration issues (essentially racialised), combined with an extreme porosity of largely invisibilised “mobilities” (routine border crossings, notably business travel, tourism and lifestyle migration). The EU in its heyday of the 1990s and early 2000s governed this through a regime of internal free movement and external fortress, neither of which were accomplished. Post-COVID, echoing Mau’s Sortier­maschinen (2021), new technologies have emerged enabling neo-imperial solutions on population (selection and integration of the wanted, exclusion and vilification of the unwanted) in Europe’s largest post-colonial powers. These politics are grounded as an solution in the electoral outcomes of the new and evolving European party political system (captured by GAL-TAN cleavages, with unstable centrist outcomes, in Marks/Hooghe and others). My other contention, as in Mau et al’s Triggerpunkte (2023), is that another politics is possible, if we can separate public voice (and particularly the gathering of oral histories) from the reductions of “public opinion”. Under the new cleavage politics, if we invite “listening”, are there viable post-imperial multi-racial alternatives to what increasingly seems like a forecast of “rivers of blood”** all across Europe?

Adrian Favell is Professor of Social and Political Theory and Founding Director of the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork, Ireland, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of Philosophies of Integration (1998), Eurostars and Euro­cities (2008), and The Integration Nation (2022). He also writes and comments regularly about Japanese contemporary art and architecture. Presently he directs the ERC AdG project (2024-28) MIGMOBS - The Orders and Borders of Global Inequality: Migration and Mobilities in Late Capitalism. Website: www.adrianfavell.com

For more information please contact jie.kang@ips.mpg.de.