ABSTRACT
This final chapter brings to the foreground links between the colonial-like EU integration project and the ongoing disadvantage experienced by Central and Eastern European movers in western Europe. By contextualising their mobility within both historical and contemporary transnational economic, cultural, and political power dynamics, the chapter arrives at a more nuanced picture of today’s micro-level ethnic power relations which are shaping the boundaries of whiteness. It then offers suggestions for how adjudicators, legislators, the media, educators, and the public should take account of contemporary mobilities, transnational contexts, globalisation, and intersectionality, to better address the nature of contemporary discrimination and racisms. The chapter also explores broader consequences of the book’s findings for how legal rules and institutional discourses define equality and the reality of ‘race’ when it comes to marginalised whites, and addresses the significance of its conclusions for the continuation and legitimacy of the EU project. The book’s contributions to critical whiteness studies and postcolonial theory are accentuated, as is the utility of both frameworks to studying intra-EU mobility. The book closes by suggesting paths for further research and policy development, while problematising the construction of white privilege and disrupting conventional proclivity to essentialise whiteness in laws and legal discourses.
