Constructing European “Souths” through Crises

Abstract

Crisis has been one of the most popular words in Europe since the turn of the millennium, exemplified by the “Eurozone crisis,” the so-called “refugee crisis,” and the latest Covid-19 crisis—among others. Drawing on critical analyses of crises and on imagined geographies of Otherness, this paper aims to discuss how diverse “Souths” are produced within the aforementioned entangled crises in/of Europe and what significations these Souths bear for Europe as well as for themselves. In doing so, it examines how in the Eurozone crisis the European South, and particularly Greece, signified an “under-developed” South that “needed” to be disciplined and guided in order to become European while becoming the “shield” for Northern banks. Second, within the so-called Europe’s “refugee crisis,” it will explore how the European South is simultaneously constructed as the “example” of solidarity, the failed gatekeeper, and the de facto prison guard of the European heartlands. Through these shifting significations in crises, the South emerges as an Other crucial for the hegemonic project of the European Union and, discursively materially and affectively, the territory of necropolitical apparatuses “shielding” the European heartland from threats.