Power and Coloniality in the European Union: The Ideological Construction of the Southern 'Other' since 2010

Our paper makes the argument that the EU’s response to the financial crisis has generated a new durable structure of inequality that is spatially organized along North-South lines and is based on new core-periphery relations. This new configuration is structurally analogous to the forms of core-periphery domination that long prevailed and sometimes still prevails between the « advanced » capitalist cores and the so called « underdeveloped » or « backward » colonial or post-colonial societies of the global South. In both cases, the words North and South designate the positioning of societies in the international or European socio-economic hierarchy. In Europe they have become the ideological signifiers of new relations of domination inside the EU between « Northern » governors setting the rules and the disciplines, and the rule-takers, the newly subaltern and dependent societies and populations. As we show, domination has been legitimized by Orientalist representations of southern Europeans who have been painted as inferior Others due to culturally determined ways of being and doing - collective mentalities – inducing indolence and corruption, and lacking the Weberian disciplines and efficiencies supposedly characteristic of the Protestant North. This ideational dimension of the N-S divergence is not the least important since the construction of otherness has served to justify and sustain the tutelage, as well as the extraordinary social violence of the regimes devised and imposed by the supposedly more rational and modern cultures of the European core. We are talking, in short, about a new order of coloniality in Europe – to borrow the concept coined by critical theorist Anibal Quijano who applies it to the experience of subordination of Latin America, and which covers the multiple dimensions of domination that characterized it (race, class, gender, economic dispossession, and so forth).