Photo used with permission of author.Europe’s crisis is only getting deeper. The middle class as we know it is rapidly vanishing due to the imperious force of neoliberalism and the social polarization that comes along with it. Change is in the air, but the scale is not necessarily tilted towards the positive side of democratic freedoms. New forms of authoritarianism are gliding over the continent. And it is not about, or not just about, the advance of far right parties and the national populism that vents its rage at migrants.
The 13 November attacks in Paris, and all their subsequent effects, have opened the spigot of a form of governance that puts the logic of security and the ‘fight against terror’ directly at its core. From the worst economic depression since the postwar period, pointing an accusing finger at Europe’s financial capital, we have now moved on to the rituals of state reinforcement and warmongering as a way to regulate social issues.
Faced with this so-called ‘outside threat’ (even though it lives in every major metropolis, driven by social abandonment and the rejection of transnational migrants), the ‘centre’ is no longer an articulated realm. Dominant discourses have become increasingly belligerent on both sides of the imaginary wall that separates the defence of human rights from the implementation of the ‘shock doctrine’, pure and simple. Today’s unpopular reforms will not merely involve ‘social pillaging’ but also conveniently administered fear.
