Carrying Europe’s ‘White Burden’,Sustaining Racial Capitalism: Young Post-Soviet Migrant Workers in Helsinki and Warsaw

Abstract

The opening up of sociology to postcolonial and critical race thinking has been predominantly animated by the relations between western metropoles and their (post)colonies. ‘Eastern Europe’ seems to be an uneasy fit in this discussion, being excluded from the idea of ‘Europe’; at the same time, it is not grouped together with non-European Others in terms of colonial histories. Drawing on fieldwork among young Russian and Ukrainian migrant workers in Helsinki (2014–2016) and Warsaw (2020), the article examines global connections that tie the North/West, South and East in these migrants’ imaginaries and material lives after migration. I demonstrate that Eastern European subjects are not outsiders to global racial capitalist orders but participate in sustaining a colonial project of Europe, whiteness and labour. The article argues for the importance of articulating postcoloniality of Eastern Europe vis-a-vis the West together with race to show the complicity of semi-peripheries with the global structures of racial capitalism.

Introduction

The opening up of sociology to postcolonial thinking posed a challenge to some of its key concepts – modernity, Europe, the West and capitalism. Refusing to locate the emergence of modernity in Europe, ‘connected sociologies’ call for the recognition of global historical connections generated by colonialism, enslavement and dispossession (Bhambra, 2014). Serious attention to colonial relations and race also leads us to reconceptualize the political economy and the understanding of capitalism, which highlights the role of racial difference in the creation of value (Amrute, 2021; Bhattacharyya, 2018; Robinson, 1983).

This important critique has been predominantly animated by the relations between western metropoles and their (post)colonies. My conversations with young Russian and Ukrainian migrants in Helsinki (2014–2016) and Warsaw (2020), who were willing to fashion themselves as ‘fully’ (as opposed to ‘incomplete’) European through migration to the imagined West, disturbed some of the white/non-white, North/South binaries, with which the discussion on race and coloniality in Europe has often operated. ‘Eastern Europe’ has been excluded from the idea of ‘Europe’; at the same time, it is not grouped together with non-European Others in terms of colonial histories. As Atanasoski and Vora (2018) pointed out, the general association of postsocialism with Central and Eastern Europe forecloses the possibility of imagining the region as fertile ground for advancing theoretical work on race and coloniality. In this article, I demonstrate that despite this seemingly uneasy fit in the discussion on postcolonial Europe and race, Eastern European subjects are not outside global racial capitalist orders but actively participate in sustaining a colonial project of Europe, whiteness and labour. Drawing on field research among young Ukrainian migrants in Warsaw (2020) and Russian migrants in Helsinki (2014–2016), I discuss the ways my research interlocutors attempt to become more valuable subjects by migrating to what they see as the ‘West’, at the same time as they become devalued as deskilled low-paid workers. I demonstrate that this route to Europeanness is a racialized journey: not only in terms of my interlocutors becoming not-‘fully’-white subjects but also through their actively racializing non-white Others as not belonging to Europe. I then ask the following question: what effects does this complicity produce?

To answer this question, the article starts with discussing scholarly work on the relations between ‘Eastern Europe’ and postcolonial Europeanness, which de-stabilizes ‘Europe’ as a homogenous entity (Boatcă, 2020; Kušić et al., 2019; Kuus, 2004). Previous literature has importantly focused on Eastern Europe’s position as a ‘lesser’ Europe or what Todorova (2009: 18) called ‘Europe’s incomplete self’. This work helps us to understand young post-Soviet ¹ migrants’ aspirations to fashion themselves as modern and European subjects through migration to what they see as the ‘West’. But I further argue that postcoloniality of Eastern Europe should be located within a wider context of racial capitalism to take seriously the ways young post-Soviet migrant workers pledge allegiance to racial hierarchies and the effects this loyalty produces. Turning to the empirical base for the article, I demonstrate that by aspiring to an imaginary ‘western’ life, my research interlocutors buttress the hierarchical system of race even though they become racialized as low-skilled workers themselves. By choosing race and Europeanness as a distinction for solidarity, they reproduce the same economic system that is sustained by the production of racial difference (Amrute, 2021; Bhattacharyya, 2018; Robinson, 1983). To put it differently, investment in whiteness does not make Eastern European migrants any ‘whiter’, but further reinforces racial distinctions, which rationalize the unequal distribution of economic resources, recognition, power and privilege. The article contributes to recent debates on race and coloniality in Europe by examining global connections that tie the North/West, South and East in young post-Soviet migrants’ imaginaries and material lives in Helsinki and Warsaw.

Postcolonial Europe: Would the ‘East’ Fit In?

The sociological discussion on Europe, race and coloniality often tends to leave out Eastern Europe for the sake of coherence of theoretical arguments; Western Europe is routinely and consistently taken as a proxy of ‘Europe’ as a whole (Ivasiuc, 2017). Including the region in the discussion on race and coloniality would complicate some of the arguments, as the region typically described under the banner of ‘postsocialism’ includes both the colonized and the colonizers (e.g. Russia and the Soviet Union), those who have some ‘European potential’ and racialized as white or ‘whiter’, and those discarded by modernity altogether (Balogun, 2018; Kassymbekova and Chokobaeva, 2021; Manolova, 2021; Tlostanova, 2018). Not fitting into the North/South binaries, ‘Eastness’ has underscored a position of ‘in-betweenness’ – not-quite-North, not-quite-South, white-but-not-quite (Blagojević, 2009; Zarycki, 2014). This dual role is a manifestation of what Boatcă (2006), following Wallerstein’s (1979) world system theory, has conceptualized as semi-peripherality (see also Tlostanova, 2018). Unlike the peripheral Orient, which has been ascribed notions of barbarism, mysticism and radical alterity (Said, 1974), East European countries were deemed reformable and subject to European assimilation (Tlostanova, 2018). This permanent catching up position is precisely what allows the racialization of ‘Eastern Europeans’ for economic gains in the West/North of Europe and in global value chains as a precarious low-paid labour force (Bieler and Salyga, 2020; Fedyuk and Kindler, 2016; Fiałkowska and Matuszczyk, 2021; Krivonos, 2019; Manolova, 2021).

Researchers working with post- and decolonial frameworks in the context of Eastern Europe highlight the ‘symbolic geographies’ of Europeanness and the working of coloniality of power in the East/West distinction of Europe (Boatcă, 2020; Chari and Verdery, 2009; Lewicki, 2020; Sayyid, 2018; Tlostanova, 2012). ‘Eastern Europe’ has been theorized as a product of the Enlightenment and Eurocentric science, the foundations of which are entangled with practices of colonial dominance outside Europe (Wolff, 1994). The imagined geography of ‘Eastness’, which is defined through its backwardness, has been a persistent signifier of the region for centuries, preceding the capitalist/communist divide (Kovačević, 2009; Todorova, 2009). These processes become particularly visible in the contemporary discourses of Europeanization and ‘transition’, which reproduce existing colonial imaginaries that place the East on a trajectory to progress (Gressgård and Husakouskaya, 2020; Kušić et al., 2019; Kuus, 2004). Semi-peripherality of Eastern Europe thus plays a role in absorbing some of the conflicts between the core and the periphery, ‘thus exempting the West from the charges of racism, colonialism, Eurocentrism and Christian intolerance’ (Boatcă, 2006: 327). For instance, many liberal Western European commentaries placed expression of racism in the East of Europe as a clash between ‘backward Eastern European racism’ and a ‘superior moral stance of humanitarianism’ of the West of Europe (Gagyi et al., 2016), with the latter continuing to invest funds in the securitization of eastern borders of the EU (European Commission, 2015; Rexhepi, 2018). Meanwhile, border regimes, inequalities within Europe and institutional arrangements enable exploitation and extraction of gendered and racialized labour from the East (Bieler and Salyga, 2020; Fedyuk and Kindler, 2016; Fiałkowska and Matuszczyk, 2021; Manolova, 2021; Näre, 2014). Eastern European workers become subject to double exploitation: first, as a result of radical deregulation and liberalization of economies in their ‘home countries’, and second, as migrant workers abroad (Bieler and Salyga, 2020; Lyubchenko, 2022; Manolova, 2021; Meszmann and Fedyuk, 2019). The structural dependence on foreign labour in the West of Europe goes hand in hand with structural vulnerability of these workers, as the COVID-19 pandemic revealed once again the reliance on East European migrant labour (Fiałkowska and Matuszczyk, 2021; Manolova, 2021).

It is in the discussion of East/West inequalities that I locate young post-Soviet migrants’ attempts to generate value as global and modern subjects through migration to what they see as the ‘West’. But I also argue that the exclusive focus on Eastern European subjects’ marginalized and self-orientalizing position vis-a-vis Western Europe may risk cementing the East/West distinction as the only significant axis of power and overlooking their own active reproduction of global racial capitalist hierarchies and distinctions. In the next section, I pinpoint Eastern Europe within the discussion on global racial orders.

Race in a ‘Lesser’ Europe

As Wekker (2016: 74) argues, ‘one can do postcolonial studies very well without ever critically addressing race’ (see also Baker, 2018). The stakes of omitting race in the discussion on postcoloniality in the East of Europe are high, considering the manner in which some terms of the postcolonial discussion have been co-opted and instrumentalized by Eurosceptic right-wing parties (Fomina, 2019; Narkowicz and Ginelli, 2021; Zarycki, 2014). In the context of Poland, Zarycki (2014) traces the deeply politicized context in which differently positioned political actors have used the seeming language of postcolonial critique for different ideological gains. For example, ‘gender ideology’, supposedly alien to the East of Europe, has been framed as a product of western ideology and even ‘colonization’ (Suchland, 2018). Likewise, the refusal to accept quota refugees in Poland and Hungary was rationalized as a refusal to be dominated by ‘Brussels’, the liberal leftist economic and educational elites from the West, which are often racialized as a ‘Jew’ figure (Kalmar, 2018). As Koplatadze (2019) argues in relation to Russian postcolonial studies, some academics’ tendency to apply postcolonial theory only to theorize Russia’s internally colonized position against the West risks reproducing Russia’s own orientalist, imperialist and colonial discourses, as well as overlooking its own investment in the reproduction of civilizational and imperial hierarchies. A focus on the region’s marginalized position vis-a-vis the West should be in dialogue with Eastern European subjects’ own active participation in the global hierarchical system of race and coloniality.

The erasure of race in the discussion on Eastern Europe partly derives from a belief that the state socialist system has overcome the problem of race (Kassymbekova and Marat, 2022; Mark and Slobodian, 2018). The Russo-Soviet imperial project played a particular role in this regard. Postcolonial and Black theorists often portrayed the Soviet Union as a viable alternative to capitalism and imperialism. For instance, civil rights activist and pioneering Black American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois saw the Soviet Union as an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist project, the view that ignored the position of non-Russian nationalities suffering starvation, deportations and genocide (Kassymbekova and Marat, 2022). Furthermore, as argued by Fikes and Lemon (2002), short-term residents sympathetic to the Soviet regime were used by the Soviet press to depict the USSR as a desirable and welcoming place for Black people. Racism was presented as a problem of the West, which produced the imaginaries of the region to be untouched by global racial ideologies (Mogilner, 2013). In fact, Black American and African students and workers visiting socialist states did not experience this promised anti-racist conduct (Mark and Slobodian, 2018; Roman, 2011). Although presenting itself as an ‘affirmative action empire’, the Soviet Union reproduced the idea of civilizational progress through colonizing non-Russian peoples (portraying it as a gift of modernity) and denied their cultural autonomy and sovereignty (Kassymbekova and Chokobaeva, 2021; Tlostanova, 2012). These legacies are visible also after the disintegration of the Soviet Union with everyday racism and extraction of labour power from Soviet former colonies by the Russian metropole (Kangas et al., 2019; Urinboyev, 2020). In the context of Poland, Balogun (2018) shows that the leaders of the Polish Maritime and Colonial League created in 1930 argued that attaining colonies was an integral part of their country becoming a proper European nation. In a similar vein, Dzenovska’s (2013) work on the ways postsocialist Latvia has attempted to reinscribe itself into Europeanness by claiming colonial possessions is another poignant reminder of the continued salience of coloniality in contemporary European politics. Likewise, racial science, physical anthropology and eugenics were not alien to Eastern Europe, having played a role in constituting ideas of the nation, blood and lineage (Gawin, 2007; Mogilner, 2013; Turda, 2010). European racialized imagination of modernity was expressed in consumer culture and entertainment, such as ‘human zoos’ in Moscow and Riga (Novikova, 2013).

Previous contributions thus make visible Eastern European subjects’ participation in Eurocentric discourses while being marginalized as ‘incomplete Europeans’ (Kušić et al., 2019). Tlostanova (2012) has coined the term ‘secondary Eurocentrism’ to refer to the derivate discourse that appropriates that of western modernity. Despite not being recognized as fully European by the West, Eastern European states produce and maintain ‘secondary Eurocentrism’, reproducing civilizational narratives and racialized ideas of white Europeanness. Loyalty to Europe has to be continuously demonstrated by those situated within and outside the EU who are constructed as not European enough and as situated right on the civilizational margins of Europeanness (Dzenovska, 2013; El-Tayeb, 2011; Gressgård and Husakouskaya, 2020; Rexhepi, 2018). Today, Eastern Europe plays the role of a buffer to control migration from the continents of Africa and Asia, willing to provide disciplinary governance and defend Europe from Muslim Others in exchange for promises of inclusion in Europe (Rexhepi, 2018). While welcoming millions of Ukrainians who flee Russia’s imperial invasion, Poland completed building a 186 km steel wall at its border with Belarus to expel asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East.

I argue that the discussion on Eastern Europe’s active participation in Eurocentric discourses should be located within the wider context of racial capitalism to understand Eastern European migrant workers’ position as both racialized and racializing subjects. Racial capitalism refers to the foundational necessity of racialized bodies to the creation of value (Amrute, 2021; Bhattacharyya, 2018). Shifting the focus from a universal white (male) worker figure vis-a-vis the bourgeoisie, theory of racial capitalism draws attention to the ways capital accumulation operates through creating, leveraging and intensifying racial distinctions among workers. This work argues that both bourgeoisie and workers aligning with whiteness benefited from colonialism and racial violence (Du Bois, 1935; Ignatiev, 1995; Roediger, 1991). The division of workers along racial lines contained the class struggle waged by racialized groups, securing capital accumulation (Du Bois, 1935; Roediger, 1991; Virdee, 2019). By investing in whiteness, migrant workers set themselves apart from their Black counterparts as a way to deal with their own alienation (Roediger, 1991). This thinking is helpful to understand the material effects produced by loyalty to the project of European whiteness. In what follows, I demonstrate that by siding with whiteness en route to ‘full’ Europeanness, Eastern European migrant workers – while racialized as not-‘fully’-white – reproduce racial distinctions required for capital accumulation.

Researching Post-Soviet Migration in Helsinki and Warsaw

The article draws on fieldwork among young Russian and Ukrainian migrants in Helsinki, Finland (2014–2016) and Warsaw, Poland (February–March 2020). My fieldwork in Helsinki was based on observations in integration and labour activation programmes as well as 54 interviews with young people (20–32 years old), who mainly came from Russia and Estonia (ethnic Russians) – the two largest migrant groups in Finland. All but one person from Russia came from a white majority background. ² In Helsinki, I met my interlocutors through municipal career counselling services, integration and language courses, education and job fairs. To my knowledge, all the people I met had a regular migrant status, although many were willing to discuss their problems of renewing residence permits and their dependency on employers. Before migration, most had already obtained vocational or university degrees. Despite this, many experienced unemployment and deskilling upon arrival to Finland. The interviews were conducted in Russian and dealt with young people’s biographies before and after migration to Helsinki, work, employment relations, bureaucracy, immigration controls and their visions of the future.

My research in Warsaw at the beginning of 2020 was based on ethnographic research and interviews with young Ukrainian migrants coming from white majority backgrounds (N = 18, 20–26 years old). Ukrainian migration is the largest of all post-USSR migratory movements to the EU (Fedyuk and Kindler, 2016), with Poland being a top receiver of labour migrants. After the full-scale Russian invasion into Ukraine in February 2022, the nature of Ukrainian migration changed as almost 5 million people from Ukraine crossed the border with Poland (UNHCR, 2022). As the data discussed in this article was collected in 2020, the article draws on the experiences of young people who moved to Poland before the full-scale invasion. This is also why the new ways in which the majority of Ukrainian people became racialized on the ‘frontiers of whiteness’ (Lyubchenko, 2022) after the full-scale invasion are beyond the scope of this article. I got acquainted with young Ukrainian migrant student workers in Warsaw through personal networks, informal gatherings, and events organized by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Most often, the young people I interviewed came to Poland to get what they called ‘European’ education and transnationally recognized capitals. Many regarded Poland as more ‘western’ and, therefore, superior to their own backgrounds (see also Samaluk, 2016). All of them were in paid employment in call centres, restaurant business, tourism, food delivery, construction and logistics. The interviews were conducted in Ukrainian and Russian, and were structured around young people’s biographical trajectories before and after migration to Warsaw, employment relations, work, paperwork, renewal of residence permits and their visions of the future. In addition to semi-structured interviews, I tried to spend time with my research participants informally to gain a better understanding of their lives outside timely designated interview settings. To my knowledge, all the young people I interviewed had a regular migrant status.

All the names mentioned in the article are pseudonyms, and the interview data were transcribed and translated from Russian and Ukrainian by the author. All of my research participants agreed to have their interviews recorded and were informed about their right to withdraw from the study at any point.

I analysed my interview transcripts and ethnographic notes using a thematic content analysis, which meant reading and organizing transcripts around key themes and patterns. In practice, I highlighted all instances when my interviewees talked about the visions of the ‘West’, their employment and references to other migrants – the topics that my interlocutors raised during interviews. These instances helped me understand how the young migrants positioned themselves vis-a-vis shared understanding of European and global hierarchies (see also Varriale, 2021) and the cost of staying in the imagined ‘West’ through their labour. The ‘West’ and ‘Europe’ emerged as central emic categories, which embodied notions of progress and futurity vis-a-vis their countries of origin, as discussed in the previous work on postcolonial perspectives in Eastern Europe (Boatcă, 2020; Krivonos and Näre, 2019; Samaluk, 2016). Even though it did not inform my research from the start, race also became a key category of analysis in a manner, in which my research interlocutors related to others and navigated their own positions after migration. I put these themes and categories in dialogue with recent discussion on postcoloniality and race in Eastern Europe to highlight how, on the one hand, young post-Soviet migrants see the West as a space for self-betterment and acquisition of transnationally recognized capitals, and, on the other hand, reproduce this space as fit only for white subjects.

‘Post-Soviet’ and ‘Eastern European’ can hardly capture all the heterogeneity of experiences, subjectivities and power relations that exist within the region and among my research interlocutors. Most certainly, there are important differences between the countries lumped together as ‘Eastern European’, ‘postsocialist’ or ‘post-Soviet’ (see, for example, Kassymbekova, 2011; Zarycki, 2014). Russia’s full-fledged imperial invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has further pointed to the long-term reluctance among many academics to take Russian imperialism and colonialism seriously, and the difficulty to see colonialism beyond the West (for exceptions see, for example, Kassymbekova and Chokobaeva, 2021; Kassymbekova and Marat, 2022; Koplatadze, 2019; Mayerchyk and Plakhotnik, 2021). Russia’s imperial relations with Ukraine as well as the relations between Russian and Ukrainian people are beyond the analytical scope of this article. My aim here is to trace some similarities in the ways ‘Eastness’ is racialized in the North/West of Europe as well as the contexts marked by Europeanization and discourses of ‘return to Europe’. I refer to racialization to talk about the processes through which perceived immutable capacities are attached to the bodies construed as ‘Eastern European’ and ‘post-Soviet’ and how these processes of generating ‘difference’ are intertwined with labour value and accumulation (Amrute, 2021).

Hierarchies of Globality and Commodified Inclusion in Europe

After an event in a Ukrainian NGO, I introduced myself to a young Ukrainian man who stayed outdoors a bit longer than others. While most of my interlocutors came to Warsaw to study in private universities after finishing high school in Ukraine, Pavlo had gained a highly competitive scientific scholarship to study in a prestigious state university in Warsaw. When I said that I was a researcher from Finland, the first thing he said was: ‘Oh, Finland is even more western than Poland.’ We had a short exchange about what exactly made Finland more ‘western’. I shared my own impressions of what seemed to me a much larger scale of things in Warsaw, such as the dominance of skyscrapers in the city’s skyline – something not common for a low-rise landscape of Helsinki. Pavlo told me that he attended a student conference in a medium-size city in central Finland, about 150 km north of Helsinki. He said: ‘in any case, Finland just felt more European than Poland’. In geographic terms, Helsinki and a town in central Finland that he visited are, in fact, further east than Warsaw. As Böröcz and Kovács (2001) remind us, the enlargement of the EU, which led to the inclusion of Finland, Sweden and Austria in 1995, was not called ‘eastern’, although in geographic terms, it was, unlike the accession of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia to the EU in 2004, conventionally referred to as ‘eastern enlargement’. Pavlo’s reaction to my perceived ‘Finnishness’, read as a more ‘convincing’ Europeanness, reveals how the West is ascribed a higher symbolic value within Europe itself, as well as the hierarchies in which different geographies and subjects are placed in relation to their proximity to the West (Boatcă, 2020). While Finland has long grappled with its own image as a European periphery, as a person working in Finland my presence revealed how the value of ‘proper’, that is western, Europeanness circulates within Europe itself.

Similarly, when I told Volodymyr, a Ukrainian citizen and a fresh graduate working in a food delivery and restaurant business, that I live in Finland, he said: ‘How is life in Finland? Must be better than it is here in Poland?’ When I wondered why he thought living in Finland was better than living in Poland, he responded: ‘This is because Finland is real Europe, it is Europe-Europe. When I travelled to Germany, Belgium, I noticed that there are big differences within Europe like the difference between Poland and the rest of Europe.’ In addition to the experience of material disparities in the two countries, the vision of the West, or Europe ‘proper’, as a more superior space goes hand in hand with the symbolic violence and feelings of self-inferiority, where eastern subjects are yet to be expected to become western (Manolova, 2021; Samaluk, 2016). As Volodymyr’s quote shows, gradations of the West and Europe are in line with gradations of the ‘Orients’, where Ukraine is more ‘eastern’ than Poland, while Poland’s full status of Europeanness became questioned when compared with Finland – ironically, a country with its own history of disidentifications with the East and struggles for whiteness (Krivonos and Näre, 2019).

Likewise, to my fieldwork companions in Helsinki, Finland was more ‘western’ than Russia and Estonia. ‘I always dreamed of living in the West’ was a phrase that I heard repeatedly from my fieldwork companions in Helsinki. These gradations of Europeanness and Orientalism are produced by fixing some places as more ‘eastern’ and less valuable than others. As Boatcă (2020) argues, the label of ‘Europe’ includes Western Europe and its white populations, but Eastern Europe needs to be named in full in order to be included in the overarching term. These ‘nesting Orientalisms’ (Bakic-Hayden, 1995) fix the essentialized differences within the European continent and draw attention to the hierarchical grading of the European space – something that often remains overlooked in the rigid postcolonial frame of ‘the West and the rest’, with which postcolonial critique has often operated.

The sense of globality, modernity and hope to achieve a better life came from the fact that both Finland and Poland were part of the EU, where my interlocutors could get what they called ‘European education’, better pay and standards of living, as well as easier travel within the Schengen area. ‘My parents and I decided that I should live in a better, more European country’, as Volodymyr told me, suggesting an association of betterment with Europe.

But the desires of ‘Europe’ cannot be analysed separately from the migration channels available to young migrants as well as differential inclusion in the global market (Manolova, 2021). The dreams of Europeanness are not only the domain of the imaginary, but unfold within the racialized logic of capitalism (Robinson, 1983; Virdee, 2019). The vision of Eastern Europe as a more backward space goes hand in hand with economic exploitation and the production of racialized labouring subjects. To most of my research interlocutors, labouring in a limited number of sectors was one of the few ways to remain in Europe. As young post-Soviet migrants attempt to generate alternative value as ‘European’ subjects, it remains unrecognized as they become produced as a particular kind of workers for the service economy. Volodymyr told me about his struggles of renewing his residence permits and his experience of working in the service sector with irregular work hours and contingent access to healthcare. When working in food delivery during his university studies, he developed health problems and needed acute health care. He struggled to gain access to medical services through his private insurance bought in Ukraine. Even though students are typically not included in the statistics on labour migration, migrant student workers greatly contribute to the economy through their precarious labour, while bearing the costs of social reproduction on their own (Maury, 2020). Anna, who had a university degree from Russia, summed up her story in Finland in a somewhat similar way:

My work experience varies from working in a kebab restaurant, cleaning apartments and being paid in cash, being a freelance translator, doing internet marketing, and teaching ballet – all this in order to survive in Finland. I am now planning to change my surname to a Finnish one as it seems to be the only way to get a normal job.

Anna was one of the people who started our conversation with a phrase ‘I always dreamed of living in the West’, when I asked what had brought her to Finland. She moved to Helsinki as a student and, since then, was employed in short-term jobs in the service sector. As Anna notes, gaining access to a ‘normal job’, which would match her skills and qualifications, is hindered by the discrimination in the labour market, where applicants with ‘non-Finnish’ names have lower chances of being contacted by employers (Ahmad, 2019). Names and surnames have an exchange- and commodity-like value, as names deemed ‘foreign’ lower one’s chances when applying for housing and jobs, which is why changing a surname became her strategy of coping with day-to-day racialization (Khosravi, 2012).

Staying in the EU as non-EU citizens was also made more difficult because of the system of residence permits, which tie migrant workers to employers (Maury, 2020). This is what Alina from Helsinki told me about the ways borders and legal regime produced her working conditions:

I was working in a restaurant and I was harassed by the employer and some male co-workers. I could not go to the police as I was afraid that the employer would take revenge and fire me, and I would not have a job, which I needed to renew a residence permit.

Alina moved to Finland as an au pair. When her visa expired, she found work in a restaurant to renew her residence permit. Dependence on employers to obtain regular residency enables specific exploitation of migrant labour. Alina told me that despite harassment, she had to continue working in the restaurant until she got her permanent residence. The work permit allows the holder to work only in the sector indicated on the permit, making it more difficult to change jobs and move in social space, as Alina made very explicit. Borders produce non-EU citizens as a distinctly disposable labour force dependent on employers, work contracts and short-term residence permits.

The stories of my research interlocutors make clear how the individualized strategies of pursuing an idealized ‘European’ life sustain a core–periphery labour supply (Manolova, 2021). To most of my research interlocutors, being in Europe or the West entailed becoming ‘migrant workers’ in the low-paid and low-status sectors with irregular working hours and little social protection. Despite this, young migrants still held to the cruel promise of being included in whiteness, which I discuss in the following section.

Europe and Race in the Narratives of Young Post-Soviet Migrants

In my conversation with Andriy, a young Ukrainian graduate working in a restaurant, we discussed that Warsaw was his first pit stop on his way to the West or ‘real’ Europe. Like many other young Ukrainian migrants in Warsaw, he mentioned Germany as the embodiment of a proper, if not ‘pure’ Europeanness – the next destination, which was imagined as different from the somewhat questionable and contestable Europeanness of Poland. The idea of European ‘properness’ has a racialized meaning. The conflation of Europeanness with whiteness becomes exposed by the presence of those racialized as non-white:

Andriy: I used to consider Germany [for further migration], but then I really did not like it in Germany when I visited it. I mean, at least, now, you come to Munich, it is horror. So many refugees, and they open all the shops run by the refugees, all these refugees. I mean you walk in Munich, in a German city, and you see only refugees in there.

Author: But how do you know that they are refugees? [Western] Germany recruited many guest workers after World War II, they rebuilt Germany, these people can be German citizens.

Andriy: OK, it is hard to say who they are actually. The point is I did not like Germany at all because of so many black people.

Andriy’s deep investment in the idea of Europe suggests a sense of disorientation when the desired Europe fails to represent whiteness. From Andriy’s perspective, the project of acquiring the capital of Europeanness by moving further ‘West’ becomes questioned by the presence of non-white people. His visceral response to this rupture makes visible how race is always present in any imaginary of Europe. Certain populations continue to be racialized as non-European through supposedly innate and unchangeable differences from those considered to be European (El-Tayeb, 2011). As Andriy’s response to my short remark makes clear, it is not the presence of migrants or refugees – that is, non-citizen subjects per se – that mattered to him. The racial presence of non-white subjects in Europe regardless of their citizenship status reveals the historically manufactured and produced conflation of whiteness with Europeanness (Du Bois, 1920). In fact, in Europe, race is commonly euphemized as ‘migrant’, ‘refugee’ or ‘of migrant background’ (El-Tayeb, 2011). These processes of racializing Europe are revealed in the perspectives of people who are willing to fashion themselves as ‘real’ Europeans and are denied this status, like Andriy.

Young post-Soviet migrants’ desire to belong to Europe, then, does not only include relations across the East/West ‘civilizational slope’ of Europe (Melegh, 2006). Conversations with my interlocutors in Helsinki and Warsaw demonstrate that they are also actively involved in the exclusion of Europe’s non-white Others and the policing of European whiteness. This is not intrinsic to Eastern European subjects, who are supposedly simply more racist and backward. This is the logic of postcolonial Europeanness itself, which is being reconfigured by young post-Soviet migrants as they search for their inclusion in Europe (Du Bois, 1920; Sayyid, 2018).

In Helsinki, I got acquainted with Maria and Pavel. We met at an ‘expat’ party – an event that branded itself as a meeting space for English-speaking highly skilled professional workers. I attended it with some young Russian-speaking people who worked as cleaners or were unemployed, with some trying to conceal their employment situation when meeting new people. I learned that Pavel had had difficulties finding a job in Helsinki for several years, which made the couple think of moving to a different country, further ‘West’ from Finland. Pavel made it clear that the reason for his long-term unemployment was the fact that he had not been born and raised in Finland. When talking about their plans for further migration, the couple positioned themselves within European and global hierarchies and structures of race to claim their deservingness and entitlement to global mobility:

Maria: I asked my friends in other countries in Europe: is there a crisis in their countries? No! The crisis is only in Finland!

Author: Although I heard from my friends in Southern Europe that they suffer a lot from unemployment too.

Maria: Yes, but let’s talk about normal, developed countries like Germany, England, France.

Author: Do you think it would be easy for you to get a job in England, for example? Do you think there is less hostility towards migrants there?

Pavel: Yeah, of course, if you come from Bangladesh, but if you are a highly skilled and educated white person . . . And compare 10 million London with 1 million Helsinki and try to find a job here or there. (Field diary)

Pavel and Maria locate themselves within global civilizational hierarchies, where they express entitlement to be part of the ‘global’ and ‘normal’ – specifically defined as countries in North-Western Europe (Krivonos and Näre, 2019). In our talk, we all recognized our status as non-citizens and not-‘fully’-white subjects, which could be an obstacle in securing employment in Finland. My interlocutors imagined London as a primary symbol of the global city where they could achieve professional success and where their national background would supposedly not be an obstacle. When I tried to steer our conversation towards the fact that they would not belong to the white majority population in England, Pavel immediately pointed to other non-white people’s intrinsic ‘inability’ to work and succeed. The supposedly neutral ideas of cosmopolitanism and globality hold together a deeply hierarchical system of race. Despite disadvantages in the labour market owing to their racialized status, Maria and Pavel attempted to invest in their whiteness at the expense of those whom they positioned outside of modernity altogether. Despite their own difficulties being recognized as professionals in Helsinki, Pavel and Maria position themselves as educated white people deserving a place in wider imaginaries of globality, unlike supposedly failing non-white Others. In addition, Maria referred to the hierarchies within Europe itself; Southern Europe appeared as ‘less’ European than Germany, England and France (Varriale, 2021). The story of Pavel and Maria makes visible how race tends to mask some dimensions that position workers, non-workers and almost workers in similar – although not identical – ways (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Hall, 1980; Virdee, 2019). Rather than divesting from the system of racialized capitalism that degraded them as non-workers, Maria and Pavel reproduced racial hierarchies that worked against them and others, hoping to get included in the white majority and become part of the professional elite in the global city of London.

What we can learn from Andriy, Pavel and Maria is that their efforts to achieve a sense of advancement through migration to Europe ‘proper’ goes hand in hand with making racial claims to whiteness and reproducing civilizational hierarchies against other racialized workers. Focusing on ‘Eastern Europe’s’ position as a lesser Europe without taking race seriously risks overlooking how, as they aspire to align themselves with Europe, migrants from the East of Europe are themselves actively involved in the reproduction of global racial hierarchies that degrade them. While the timespan of my research is too short to make comparisons with previous historical work on European migrants ‘becoming white’ in the USA (Ignatiev, 1995; Roediger, 1991), my conversations with some of the post-Soviet migrants since 2014 show that racism against others did not make them any ‘whiter’ nor did it improve their labour market positions. Instead, many secured jobs in low-paid sectors through re-training or migrant ‘integration’ programmes.

Conclusions

In this article, I have shown that the rigid postcolonial dichotomy of ‘the West and the rest’ does not capture the positions of young post-Soviet migrants who belong neither to the West nor to the radical non-white ‘rest’, yet actively position themselves and others in global racial orders. My research interlocutors living in Helsinki and Warsaw did not find the imagined West in the core western metropole, which is taken as a central site of postcolonial and critical race critique. Their ‘West’ and Europe turned out to be on the eastern limit of Europeanness – the locations that tend to remain overlooked in the dominant discussion on race and coloniality. As young post-Soviet migrants are acutely aware of the differential value that is attached to different geographies within Europe, their narratives and imaginaries de-stabilize Europe as a uniform and coherent entity, which is at the centre of sociological discussion on race. My interlocutors’ imaginaries of the West in migration and the efforts to fashion themselves as global and ‘European’ prompt us to rethink where we continue to locate the West in postcolonial critique, and what we mean by ‘Europe’, when trying to unmake it as the cradle of modernity (Bhambra, 2014).

While sociological discussion on race and coloniality in Europe has tended to obscure the position of Eastern Europe, I have demonstrated how young post-Soviet migrants make global connections between the East, West/North and South in their imaginaries and material lives after migration. The seemingly uneasy ‘in-between’ position of Eastern Europe should not evacuate the region from the theoretical engagements with race. East–West migration makes visible what the white/non-white, the ‘West and the rest’ binaries tend to leave undiscussed; namely, how migrant workers may choose whiteness to class as a distinction for social life en route to Europeanness. As young post-Soviet migrants aspire to become recognized as ‘fully’ European, they defend the project of Europe at a time when the idea of white Europe is being increasingly challenged (El-Tayeb, 2011). The policing of racial hierarchies becomes ever more visible among those positioned on the edge of whiteness and, at the same time, who are loyal to the colonial project of Europe.

These political choices along the lines of race and labour further beg a question of what effects this loyalty produces in the context of contemporary racial capitalism. Most of my research interlocutors can only realize the dream of being in Europe by being made into low-paid precarious workers in the service economy. I have argued that allegiance to whiteness among these intermediary workers, who are both racialized and racializing others, plays an important role of stabilizing racial capitalist orders, as they buttress the system that produces racial difference and places workers at a different distance from liberal humanity. By investing in whiteness, they maintain racial production of difference, which guarantees inequalities required by capitalism (Robinson, 1983). In other words, by choosing whiteness, my interlocutors maintain the very same system that racializes them as ‘low-skilled’ workers. Despite the failed promises and fantasies of ‘Europe’, young post-Soviet migrants continue to play the dominance game and become enforcers of the racial capitalist system that divides people in the name of capital.