Conditional Whiteness and the Grammar of Belonging: Race, Democracy and Illiberal Drift Across the United States and Eastern Europe at the US Semiquincentennial

On the eve of the US semiquincentennial, this essay argues that Central and Eastern Europe is indispensable to understanding the racial and civilizational grammars shaping US democracy – past and present. We contend that Eastern and Central Europe should be treated not as peripheral or episodic, but as historically entangled with US nation-making. From early twentieth-century eugenic debates and immigration quotas to contemporary invocations of ‘Western civilization’, mechanisms of belonging in the United States have developed in dialogue with European racial thought and geopolitical imaginaries. Specifically, we examine how ‘Balkanization’ has functioned as a traveling racial technology, projecting disorder onto Eastern and Central Europe while disciplining difference in the United States. Drawing on Ivan Kalmar’s concept of conditional whiteness, we show how US imaginaries position the region as racially European while casting it as ‘civilizationally’ unstable. This ambivalence allows Central and Eastern Europe to serve as ally, warning and mirror for US anxieties about alleged fragmentation and decline. Marco Rubio, for instance, frames Central Europe as crucial to US policy objectives while locating it outside of the ‘Western Civilization’ that animates much of far-right thinking today. By foregrounding these historical and contemporary entanglements, we argue for expanding American Studies’ transnational coordinates to include Central and Eastern Europe as a critical site for understanding illiberal drift within US democracy itself.