Disposing of the Discredited: A European Project
Disposing of the Discredited: A European Project
In a world where financial markets are hegemonic, credit is synonymous with value. Corporations, but also states, and even human beings, can be perceived as projects looking for investors. Within this global context, the European Union comes with two distinctive features: a rapidly aging population combined with a growing reluctance to open its borders to migrants. This means that, far from staking their credit on the restoration of some demographic dynamism, European nations continuously seek to raise the ratio of capital to labor. They do whatever is necessary to attract investments but also to prevent people deprived of favorably rated resources from coming in and to weed out the segments of their population that are the most likely to diminish their overall credit. Disposing of the discredited can thus be analyzed as a multidimensional European project rich in public-private partnerships: it involves letting migrants drown in the Mediterranean sea, making life unbearable for allegedly undesirable populations such as the Roma, pushing an increasing number of insufficiently malleable employees to suicide, erasing all traces of a large proportion of the unemployed from official registers, and, in countries like Greece, Portugal and Ireland, pushing more and more young nationals to migrate.
Keywords: borders, capitalism, crisis, Europe, European Union, finance, governance, migration, neoliberalism, refugees
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