Eastern Europe Is Treated Like a Racial Periphery by Western Capitalism

The East Is Not a Color

In 2004, the European Union welcomed eight post communist countries into its fold: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The official story was about reunification, healing the Cold War wound, extending the blessings of liberal democracy eastward. But Ivan Kalmár, a researcher at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, argues something else was happening. The East was being let in, yes. But it was being let in as a periphery.

Kalmár’s 2023 paper in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies makes a claim that is uncomfortable for both Western liberals and Eastern nationalists. The economic subordination of Eastern Europe within the EU is not just a matter of GDP gaps or brain drain. It is a matter of race. Not skin color. A different kind of race. An imagined barrier that allows Western capital to extract cheap labor and new markets from the East while denying Eastern Europeans the full protections of the liberal state (Kalmár, 2023).

This is not a metaphor. Kalmár draws on the concept of racial capitalism, which holds that capitalism requires a subaltern periphery, a group of people who can be treated as less than fully human so that their exploitation feels natural. The West has found its new periphery in the East. And the racism directed at Eastern Europeans, Kalmár argues, is not a hangover from old stereotypes about vodka and backwards peasants. It is a structural necessity of the current economic order.

What Does Racial Capitalism Have to Do With Poland?

The term “racial capitalism” was coined by the scholar Cedric Robinson in the 1980s. It describes how capitalism did not replace racial hierarchy but absorbed it. The global economy runs on a system where some people are considered fully human and others are not, and that distinction is used to justify paying them less, exposing them to more risk, and denying them political voice.

Kalmár applies this framework to the European Union’s Eastern enlargement. The core insight is simple: the West needed the East to be a source of cheap labor and new markets. But for that to work, the East had to be placed behind an imagined racial barrier. If Eastern Europeans were treated as fully equal, they would demand equal wages, equal protections, equal dignity. So the West constructed a narrative of Eastern inferiority, a story about historical and cultural incompatibility that made the East’s “failure” to catch up seem like its own fault (Kalmár, 2023).

This is not a conspiracy. It is a pattern. When the Eastern European economies struggled to converge with the West after 2004, the blame was placed not on the terms of accession, the capital flight, or the austerity imposed by Brussels. It was placed on the East’s alleged corruption, its backwardness, its lack of “European values.” The West got to have its cheap labor and its moral superiority at the same time.

The Impossible Position of Being Eastern European

Kalmár’s paper is particularly sharp on the psychological and political consequences of this racialisation. Eastern Europeans find themselves in an equivocal position, somewhere between the core West and the Global South. They are not white in the way that Germans or French are white. But they are not Black or Brown either. They are a kind of provisional whiteness, always subject to revocation.

This creates a specific dynamic. Many Eastern Europeans respond to their own racialisation by projecting it onto others. They try to affirm their threatened whiteness by distancing themselves from the Global South. You see this in the rise of anti immigrant sentiment in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. It is not just ordinary xenophobia. It is a reaction to being treated as less than fully European yourself.

But the hierarchy does not stop at the EU’s external border. It operates within Eastern Europe too. Kalmár notes that each country to the East is imagined as more “Eastern European” than the one before it. Poles look down on Ukrainians. Ukrainians look down on Moldovans. Moldovans look down on Romanians. The chain continues until you reach the prototypical Eastern European nation, Russia (Kalmár, 2023). This is not a coincidence. It is a function of the same imperial logic that places the East behind a racial barrier. Everyone wants to be the one standing just on the right side of the line.

How the West Made the East a Racial Category

The paper traces how this racist discourse has penetrated global and European politics, economics, and media. It is not subtle. When Western journalists write about Eastern Europe, they reach for a specific vocabulary: “backward,” “corrupt,” “Soviet,” “unstable,” “nationalist.” These words do not describe reality. They create it.

Consider the coverage of Poland and Hungary’s democratic backsliding. The analysis is often correct: these governments have undermined judicial independence, attacked press freedom, and eroded democratic norms. But the framing is almost always about Eastern Europe’s innate authoritarian tendencies, its failure to internalize Western values. Rarely does the analysis mention that the EU’s own austerity policies, imposed on the East after accession, created the economic precarity that populists exploited. Rarely does it mention that Western capital extracted billions from the region while offering little in return.

Kalmár’s argument is not that Eastern European governments are blameless. It is that the West’s moral outrage is selective and self serving. The same Western institutions that now condemn Orbán and Kaczyński were happy to cheer them when they opened their economies to Western banks and corporations. The racism against Eastern Europeans reflects, in the final analysis, the long standing imperial rivalry between the West and Russia (Kalmár, 2023). The East is punished not for its sins but for its position.

The Data That Backs This Up

Kalmár’s paper is a theoretical and conceptual piece, not an empirical study with numbers. It synthesizes existing research on racial capitalism, post colonial theory, and European integration. But the evidence for his claims is not hard to find.

Wage data tells part of the story. An Eastern European worker doing the same job as a Western European worker earns roughly 40 to 60 percent less, depending on the country. This is not because they are less productive. It is because the labor market is structured to extract value from the periphery and send it to the core. Capital flows freely across borders. Labor does not. Eastern Europeans who move West for work often find themselves in low status jobs, living in cramped housing, and facing discrimination from employers and landlords.

The COVID 19 pandemic made this dynamic visible. Eastern European migrants working in German slaughterhouses and British farms were hailed as “essential workers” while being denied basic protections. When they got sick, they were blamed for spreading the virus. When they died, they were replaced.

Kalmár’s paper does not cite these specific examples, but they fit the pattern he describes. The East is treated as a source of cheap, disposable labor. When it protests, it is told to be grateful for the opportunity.

What the Research Does Not Prove

Kalmár’s framework is powerful, but it has limits. He does not claim that all Western criticism of Eastern Europe is racist. Some of it is legitimate. Corruption exists in the East, just as it exists in the West. Democratic backsliding is real. The question is why the West applies a different standard to the East than it does to itself.

The paper also does not resolve the tension between class and race. Is the exploitation of Eastern Europeans primarily a matter of economic class, or is it a distinct form of racialisation? Kalmár argues it is both. The racial barrier is what allows the economic exploitation to feel natural. But the line between class and race is blurry, and the paper does not fully clarify it.

There is also a question about agency. Kalmár is careful to note that Eastern Europeans are not passive victims. They participate in their own racialisation by projecting it onto others. But the paper could say more about how Eastern Europeans resist this system, not just how they reproduce it.

The Paradox of Whiteness

One of the most striking sections of Kalmár’s paper deals with the paradox of whiteness. Eastern Europeans are phenotypically white, meaning they are not subject to the same kind of racial discrimination as people of color. But they are not treated as fully white either. They are a kind of subordinate whiteness, a whiteness that can be revoked at any moment.

This paradox creates confusion. When Eastern Europeans experience discrimination in the West, they often struggle to name it. They are told they cannot be victims of racism because they are white. But the discrimination they face is clearly based on ethnicity, nationality, and cultural stereotypes. It is not the same as anti Black racism. But it is not nothing either.

Kalmár’s solution is to use the concept of racialisation rather than race. Racialisation is the process by which a group is marked as different and inferior, regardless of skin color. This allows him to talk about the discrimination faced by Eastern Europeans without equating it to the experience of people of color. It also allows him to show how Eastern Europeans can be both victims and perpetrators of racialisation, depending on the context.

The Russian Shadow

The paper ends with a geopolitical argument that is likely to be controversial. Kalmár writes that racism against Eastern Europeans reflects, in the final analysis, the long standing imperial rivalry between the West and Russia (Kalmár, 2023).

This is a provocative claim. It suggests that the West’s treatment of Eastern Europe is not just about economics or culture. It is about geopolitics. The East is the battleground where the West and Russia vie for influence. The people who live there are pawns in a larger game. Their humanity is secondary to their strategic value.

This argument has implications for how we understand the current war in Ukraine. The West’s support for Ukraine is real, but it is also conditional. Ukrainian refugees are welcomed in some countries and treated with suspicion in others. The line between ally and expendable asset is thin.

Kalmár’s paper was published before the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But his framework helps explain why the West’s response to the war has been so uneven. Ukraine is the prototypical Eastern European nation, the one that stands just on the edge of the West’s imagined barrier. It is being offered support, but not membership. It is being praised for its courage, but not treated as an equal. The racialisation of the East continues, even in the midst of war.

What This Actually Means

• ▸Stop treating Eastern Europe as a monolith. The region is diverse, with different histories, languages, and political trajectories. The term “Eastern Europe” itself is a Western construction that flattens complexity and reinforces hierarchy.

• ▸Recognize that economic integration without political equality is exploitation. The EU’s Eastern enlargement was a success for capital, not for people. The East got access to Western markets, but it also got austerity, brain drain, and a permanent second class status.

• ▸Understand that Eastern European nationalism is partly a reaction to Western racism. When Poles or Hungarians embrace anti immigrant rhetoric, they are not just expressing xenophobia. They are trying to claim a whiteness that the West has denied them. This does not excuse their behavior, but it explains it.

• ▸Be skeptical of Western moral outrage about Eastern Europe. The same Western institutions that condemn democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland were happy to work with those governments when it served their economic interests. The outrage is selective and self serving.

• ▸Recognize that the East’s racialisation is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. The system needs a periphery that can be exploited without guilt. If the East stops serving that function, the West will find another one. The solution is not to make the East more “European.” It is to dismantle the racial hierarchy that makes exploitation possible.

Kalmár’s paper is not a comfortable read for anyone. It challenges Western liberals who think they are on the side of progress. It challenges Eastern nationalists who think they can escape their racialisation by adopting the West’s prejudices. It challenges everyone who wants to believe that the EU is a project of enlightenment rather than a continuation of empire by other means.

But uncomfortable does not mean untrue. The East is not a color. It is a position. And until we understand that, we will keep mistaking the symptoms for the cause.