The ideology of Europeanism and Europe’s migrant other

A new article authored by CPS Research Fellow Celine Cantat has been published in the journal of International Socialism.

In official accounts, ‘Europe’ is presented as an internationalist or a post-national project, confining to the past the excesses of nationalism and national rivalries and promoting cooperation and friendship among its member states. In this paper, Cantat critically engages with such narratives by interrogating the process of European integration from the perspective of the forms of marginalization that it has produced, with a particular emphasis on the figure of the migrant as ‘Other’. This study of the production of alterity points to the persistence of capitalist-territorial ideologies in the idea of Europe. These have never been alien to European political projects. Rather they have been central to the constitution of the European nation-state over time and remain embedded in the territorially coded ostensibly supra-national figure of the EU.

Keywords: anti-racism, borders, Europe, European Union, Hungary, migration

The article is available online here (issue: 152, posted on 6th October 2016).