Who Is the EU for? Race, Europe , and the Global Order

The European Union stands at a crossroads. Its founding promises of peace, convergence, and multilateralism are increasingly strained by debt, migration, sovereignty, and militarization. The introduction to this Special Issue begins with the question: who is the EU for? To stretch this question analytically we move beyond conventional debates on globalization and sovereignty foregrounding the colonial and racialized conditions that shape European integration. Colonialism, we argue, remains operative, structuring the production of race, racism, and anti-Blackness within and beyond Europe. Drawing on radical traditions of thought on colonialism and anti-Blackness, critical political economy, postcolonial theory, and institutional analysis, the introduction reframes the analytic of who the EU is for by showing how the Union’s commitment to universal values coexists with practices that reproduce hierarchies of life and death. We argue that the EU operates as a form of global power that mobilizes race and racism as constitutive mechanisms of legitimacy, authority, mobility, and value. Contemporary militarization, through defense integration, rearmament, and strategic autonomy, intensifies these dynamics by recoding racial hierarchies as security imperatives. Competing responses, from right-wing sovereign internationalism to left critiques of neoliberalism, rarely confront Europe’s colonial and racialized constitutive role in sustaining global inequalities. These unresolved contradictions and failures open up urgent questions about how Europe’s political and economic order continues to reproduce global hierarchies of power. It is precisely this tension that the special issue takes up, responding by engaging the intertwined colonial and racist projects in the EU. The contributors collectively frame crisis as a key site through which colonial violence is reconfigured, displaced, and normalized in contemporary EU governance. In so doing, they reposition the EU not as a neutral arbiter of order, but as an active geopolitical site where racialized and imperial forms of power are continuously produced, contested, and reimagined.