Fall 2017 JPI

of prosperity. France's example shows that welfare can be sacrificed by EU-friendly governments in
order to satisfy welfare-based secularist arguments at any time. Eurosceptic, right-wing populist parties
on the other hand, reject libertarian European values and push for an exit. Libertarian values have
been absorbed into neo-liberal rationalism in a political alignment that has emerged as an asymmetrical
dynamic between a European Commission that is more liberal than the average member-state.
Geo-political discontinuity is also exemplified by countries of entry, in their relationship to the
EU. Greece, which has always been imagined as the frontier of free Europe, currently has a left-wing
populist government that aligns itself both with traditional left redistribution and mildly progressive
libertarian values. The Greek government's failure to stick to the outcome of the 2015 referendum,
testifies to the clientelism that defines its relationship to the EU. The election of a left government
was nevertheless a turning point for European policies on refugees; it followed the “hands-off”
attitude of the Greek government which created a humanitarian-industrial complex to deal with
refugee influx on Greek soil by contracting NGO's with European money. EU policy has repeatedly
undermined national sovereignty in Greece, blaming the Greek government for failing to impose
adequate asylum policies. This has led to a rise in support for the Euro-skeptic and xenophobic Golden
Dawn party. 27
If a European identity is to emerge from this crisis, measurements of integration or
globalization cannot go on ignoring the cultural and social integration of non-nationals as a parameter.
But for the time being, asylum applications are piling up because of geographical discontinuity (the
Macedonian border), treatment of refugees as human capital (the rhetoric that refugees can be a
solution to demographic decline in developed European countries) and a lack of obligation to
solidarity (ethno-centric nationalism). Moreover, employing the European databases of population
flows, the humanitarian-industrial complex is exploiting the crisis to extract knowledge from border
controls and enhance the police state and the war against terrorism.
WELFARE IDENTITY
This paper has tried to show that the idea of Europe is most of all a matter of geography. The
regressiveness of this idea is undoubtedly the product of ethnic-cleansing and border control, that
have not only replaced polyethnicity with a pluralism producing surplus human “stock” but have also
undermined European-scale integration by promoting a reductive form of internationalism based on
the privilege of citizenship and race. The creation of racially pure states might not be an exclusively
European occurrence, but a union that is both made of and encourages the formation of the nationstate
as a unit, is. Diversity in Europe is a matter of dependency; to the nation-state order on the one
hand, to the nation framing the state on the other.
Both obscurantist, reactionary notions of European identity like Mitteleuropa 28 and rationalistic
associations of Cold War Europe with the “West” 29 are outcomes of “forgetting,” that invent
European identity negatively, namely against its Eastern Other. The imperialist nature of the nationstate
lies in its need to pass through the stage of an ethnic empire. 30 If the current identity crisis of
Europe is an “end” of some idea, it is the end of the nation-state. For since its creation, the nation-
27 For more on how sovereignty, or the lack thereof, has affected the rise of right-wing extremism, see Genealogy of a Crisis: Europe, Greece, and the
Management of the Refugee Population, by Helen Makkas: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1430/genealogy-of-a-crisis-europe-greece-andthe-management-of-the-refugee-population.
28 Gerard Delanty, Inventing Europe (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1995), 105.
29 Delanty, Inventing Europe, 115.
30 Ibid, 104.
JPI Fall 2017, pg. 41