Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism, and the Future of White Majorities Eric Kaufmann
Thanks very much for welcoming me to such a beautiful campus and to the Arendt Center. Three sort of apologies to begin with: First, that I don’t have a British accent, despite teaching at a British university; so you don’t get to have that. Second, PowerPoint: yes, I’m sorry, I’m using it; but I won’t, hopefully, hit you over the head with it too much. And third, I am a social scientist, so I guess I’m breaking with that humanities thrust of most of today. But hopefully I can keep you entertained at least a little bit for the next 20 minutes. My book Whiteshift is very much about the rise of right-wing populism and also connecting this to the idea of white identity. The title Whiteshift is because my agent said we need to have a one-word title, but it has two real meanings. The first is, in our lifetimes, the decline of white majorities in Western societies, North America and Western Europe—you’re familiar with the idea that whites, non-Hispanic whites, will decline to roughly 50 percent of the US population around 2050. That’s also going to happen in New Zealand and Canada. In Western Europe it will happen by the end of the century. That’s a major, major change in these societies. I’m arguing that it is this demographic shift that ultimately underlies what we’re seeing in terms of the upsurge of right-wing populism, and it’s very much connected to the immigration issue, which I’m going to talk about a fair bit. The second meaning of whiteshift is really a much longer-term development. I’m arguing that white majorities will ultimately give way to mixed-race majorities, but that’s not going to happen for quite some time. So if you take England and Wales, some work I’ve done with a demographer there suggests that the mixed-race share, which is only 2 percent of the population now, is still only going to be about 7 percent by midcentury. It’s not till we get to the end of the century that we start to see a jump—it’s up to 30 percent based on existing intermarriage rates. Immigration doesn’t affect the picture much. And then very quickly after that, 50 years later, it’s 75 percent of the population. That’s the sort of second, more longer-term meaning of whiteshift: that the meaning of white is going to change substantially to become what Mike Lind talks about as being a “beige” ethnic majority. There [are] two real entities that I’m talking about in this book: one is ethnicity and the other is nationhood. By ethnicity I’m referring to a community that believes itself to be of shared ancestry. We heard about the Jews and descent back to Abraham, for example. This idea of having a myth of origin is 30
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Racism and Antisemitism
