16 - Can a Post-National Vision Better Tackle Racial Discrimination than a National One? A Response to Adrian Favell

Summary

I am broadly sympathetic to Adrian Favell’s chapter, both because I concur with his assessment of the evidence, and because I share his normative concerns about the dangers (and inaccuracy) of privileging of the ‘nation’ among human social or political groupings. In this brief response, I will instead focus on some areas of disagreement, or perhaps tensions in the argument, and the evidence on how far the EU has been able to fulfil Favell’s normative ideals in practice. My perspective here is as the director of a race equality think tank, the Runnymede Trust, based in London, but having done a significant amount of work across Europe, including in Brussels. Favell’s chapter does an excellent job of highlighting and weaving together how what he calls the ‘post-national and cosmopolitan vision of multiethnic Britain’ relates to the ‘post-national and cosmopolitan consequences of EU freedom of movement’. At the same time he honestly confronts the extent to which internal EU freedom of movement has gone hand in hand with vigorous and racially discriminatory border enforcement. I want to press Favell a bit more on: a) how far these related turns were implemented, whether as consistent normative claims, or in terms of policy developments; and b) how far the trends are related, or rather pull apart. I focus principally on questions of race, identity, immigration and citizenship, and have to sidestep the equally difficult challenge for Europe in terms of its economic policies, especially since the financial crisis.

In our research report in advance of the EU referendum (Khan and Weekes-Bernard, 2015), Runnymede found that black and minority ethnic British people were concerned about English nativism in the Leave campaign. At the same time, most of our research participants didn’t show much interest in the EU, whether as an identity, or in terms of conferring any rights or benefits. In particular, participants laughed at the idea of exercising ‘freedom of movement’, the key example at the heart of Favell’s chapter, by moving to, say, Spain, France or Poland. One way of putting this is that not everyone in Britain (or anywhere else in Europe) actually thought of freedom of movement as a right.