Introduction

Abstract

Since the 2008 economic crisis, postsocialist Eastern Europe has become a new hub of white nationalist organising. Hungary's Viktor Orbán, for instance, has consolidated his illiberal regime by cultivating a network of regional and global far-right allies, from the alt-right publishing house Arktos Media to the World Congress of Families -a focal point of the anti-gender movement. In August 2021, FOX News' Tucker Carlson took his cable show to Budapest for an entire week, interviewing Orbán and presenting his regime as a success story of populism from which the United States had much to learn. Tacitly or not, 'whiteness' is a main pillar of Eastern European populists' unapologetic nativist agenda, which idealises the heteronormative, white, Christian family and relentlessly demonises migrants. 1 The power of such a position lies in part in the claim that the region is racially innocent, untainted historically by complicity with Western Europe's imperialism overseas. Thus unburdened from a 'white guilt' supposedly found in a multicultural West, the region's nativists can become the true defenders of a white Europe, or white West. Often unmarked, but deeply powerful, this 'innocent' whiteness in Eastern Europe inspires today's global Right, and urgently demands attention from scholars of race and racism elsewhere.Having not been involved in colonialism or transatlantic enslavement on the same terms, Eastern Europe has conventionally been viewed as 'beyond' the racial dynamics of the West or black Atlantic in scholarship too. Some of this absence is a consequence of how commonly racism is still perceived as consisting only of a black-white binary or a binary between 'white' and 'not white' -a system which is confounded by Eastern Europe and other global semi-peripheries. 2 Systems of racial classification in the global 'core' have racialised Eastern Europe's territories and people in ambiguous, contradictory and unstable ways, recently summed up by Ivan Kalmar as being a position of 'white but not quite'. 3 It has also been described as