This paper draws a critical approach of the austerity measures imposed on the so-called PIGS. Particularly, it explores the recent racist framing in political and media discourses of the peripheral member states of the EU, during the debt crisis and decomposition of the Eurozone. The paper observes a relation between Core and Periphery of the Eurozone system based on 3 elements; racism, neocolonialism and uneven development. A racist narrative is constructed which blames the PIGS and their inhabitants for the crisis on the basis of “cultural characteristics and habits”, such
as laziness, non-productivity, corruption, wasteful spending and lying. This culturalization of politics (Brown 2008), which reduces the political and economic divergences between center and periphery to a cultural problem between a culture of productivity and one of laziness, legitimates drastic austerity measures and loss of
sovereignty. The combination of recent adjustments and the racist narrative is the
construction of a new type of colonialism within the EU, very similar to what Nkrumah
(1965) observed in the neocolonial world. A democratic solution for the crisis requires
the politicization and political integration of all citizens of the EU as equal citizens,
although this currently seems impossible.
