The Idea of Europe

Abstract

Today the EU as the fortress Europe is a regime that produces an accelerated legally sanctioned system of restrictions, discriminations and economic dispossessions; a space of intensified racialization that has at its core structural racism. Racialization refers to a process by which certain groups of people are singled out for unique treatment on the basis of real or imagined physical characteristics. Mostly it targets activities of those termed as (ethnic) minorities. It transforms societies into racialized societies. This process is today going so far that we have a process of racialization being imputed, without any “race” prerogatives but serving as a measure of class discrimination, subjugation, and finally dispossession. The EU is providing the grounds for not only a state of exception but for a racial-State, giving a free hand to detention, segregation and discrimination under the veil of the protection of nation-State citizens and even the protection of refugees from “themselves,” from their “drive” to try to illegally enter fortress Europe and therefore probably being in a situation to die. These processes of invigorated control of borders, expulsion of refugees, etc., are judicially, economically and, last but not least, discursively and representationally (as different semio-technological regimes), ratified, legislated, and normativized. Today it is central to draw a genealogy of racism that parallels capitalism’s historical transformations and historicization.