ABSTRACT
This chapter sets the background for how the EU envisions itself as a benevolent project. It then presents the core framework of the book, by asking how such rhetoric can be reconciled with the actual EU and western Member State policies, especially those limiting the rights of Central and Eastern European movers. After situating anti-east hostility across western Member States within empirical evidence of their discrimination, racialisation, labour de-skilling, and experiences of racism, the chapter explains its innovative argument—that the 2004 Eastern Enlargement process, the mobility from east to west, and the poignant contestation over this mobility during Brexit should all be situated within the long-standing rhetorical and policy peripheralisation of the east. Bigger questions about the scope of EU citizenship and about integration are also introduced. Finally, the book’s methodological approach is explained and situated within critical whiteness studies and postcolonial theory, before elucidating contemporary fractures within whiteness, and its intersections with transnational socio-economic status, as affected by global hierarchies of privilege. Weaving together existing fragmented literature, the chapter brings to the foreground the book’s novel substantive, methodological, and theoretical contributions to multiple areas of study. It closes by summarising the book’s structure.
