The

European Union between Free Market and Fascism

A Reader The European Union between Free Market and Fascism is a reader that comprises a series of texts that tackle social, economic and political inconsistencies and transgressions of the First world, specifically EU. Although more precise title of this reader would probably have been The European Union as Perfect Combination of Free Market Economy, Colonialism, White Christian Fundamentalism and Racism, current title serves well to accent not only main discourses of the Union, but to accent the non-decisive character of the Union in political adoption of any of these models of rule. Hence, since the official agenda of the Union, in regard to the establishment (or sustainment) of the rule of law, human rights and equality in approach to the hierarchies of rule is profoundly influenced by the free market logic, the inconsistencies produced by this relation were not deemed in this reader as incidents (as complicit academic, intellectual or colloquial argument would have suggested), but as a reflection of at best, constitutive hypocrisy in reproduction of institutional, economic, political and cultural discourses of the Union. Hence, to state that the hypocrisy marks the logic behind the sustainment of circulation of capital is, of course far, too banal, what is really happening is that ultrainput.com 1

the state of exception (as an exception to constitutional dimension of the law) and dominant epistemic and institutional discourses are being intertwined to that measure where they already became a normative. The infringements of the constitutional dimension of the law; racist classifications of the population; discriminatory immigration politics; de- secularization of the state; racist, hypocritical foreign policy in regard to EU's periphery; harbouring of double-standards in political conduct; utilization of art and culture for ideological goals; equalization of fascism and anti-fascism; utilization of populist politics; engagement in wars of conquest in the Third world are just some of the procedures that mark the contemporary model of rule in the EU. Consequently, complete subjugation of society to the free market agenda was not marked only by mere regime's divinization of consumerism as proper model of contemporary emancipation, but was marked by (re)instatement of the racial hierarchies and classification of those more and less worthy of integration into the market or worthy of having any rights at all. Sustainment of these hierarchies therefore serves not just as as a tool that would subvert political antagonization of capitalist opression, but it also serves as continuation of an Eurocentric racist epistemology that claims the monopoly on definition of progress, civilization and/or generally modernism. Consequently, coloniality or colonialism seem to have stayed a fundamental pattern of European political thought and a matrix of rationalization of upgraded colonial style exploitation that influenced both internal politics of the Union and its expansion, that is, production of central and peripheric zones of exploitation and control. Hence, Eu's utmost (official) neglect, irresponsibility and malevolance in approach to its own colonial history, genocides, subjugation, expropriation and slavery, that all contributed to (Western) EU's position as one of the wealthies regions in the World therefore pointed to the practice of sticking to the old recipy of rationalization of exploitation and its upgrading to contemporary set

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of rules, which, as a result of both the colonial capitalist expansion and/or auto- colonial complicity to ambigous exercise of democracy, continue to repeat. In this context, in the first text in this reader, EU-Visione, Sebastjan Leban tackles the historical progression of Europe, the logic behind the procedures of contemporary colonialism and its justification matrixes that lurked behind the democratization of the Southeast Europe and its subjugation to the free market exploitation, which is underway as we speak. The second text, Fortified Knowledge: From Supranational Governance to Translocal Resistance by Lina Dokuzovi and Eduard Freudman specifically deals with the issues of education, that is, privatization of education institutions and conditioning of knowledge, but also provides a global perspective in which it deals with Eus role in the establishment of post WW2 global economy, based on debt economy and "Structural Adjustment Policies. Stas Kleindeinst's text, EU Some Thoughts on Ideology deals with procedures and ideological grounds that show us how the representation of contemporary European ideology works by organizing a matrix of relations towards its own history (or in this case, towards the history of Eastern Europe) that legitimizes Europes own processes of violence and makes them natural to the functioning of the Union. Tatjana Greif's text, Catatonic Harmony or Let's Blame Homos, deals with the destructive role clerical circles, specifically the church has on institutional and otherwise discrimination of sexual minorities and women in the EU. Specifically, author focused on a procedures used by the church and reactionary circles to equalize pedophilia and homosexuality, that is, to pacify their own criminal transgressions. efik Tatlis text Racist Core of EUs Structural Design deals with political procedures that equal the democracy to ideology and with consequent destruction of political society and political state in favor of imposition of colonial racial hierarchies that are being imposed as bases of social and political differentiation.

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Ivana Marjanovis text The Racist Regime of the (White) EU Schengen Border Regime addressed the (racist) immigration policies of the Union, specifically analyzing the case and implications of German deportation of number of (German speaking) Roma people out of Germany. Further implication Marjanovi dealt with included the notion of exception to neoliberalism, that is, the procedures that made political and social exclusion of racially qualified populations and subjectivities a constitutive part of a new European apartheid (Marjanovi). And, Marina Grinis text De-Coloniality of Time and Space addresses the relation among the post-Fordist mode of production, monopolization of the notion of modernity and subjugation of contemporary art as an ideological instrument for production of fictive decolonization of the colonizers themselves. In short, this text tackles the temporal war contemporary capitalist regime (with an accent on the Western power structures) wage in order to embellish both its genocidal past and its oppressive present by ascribing of a status of a victim to it self. So, as Walter Mignolo stated by referring to Santiago Castro-Gmez who saw colonial epistemology as the hubris of the zero-point: the knowledge of the observer who cannot be observed and since EU has ascribed that kind of exclusivity to it self, this reader should serve as anti-Eurocentric and de- colonial denial of that exclusivity. Some of the text in this reader have already been published and were contributed by the authors with their approval. The texts that have not been designated as published are hereby published for the first time. The opinions presented in this reader are the opinions of the authors, not exclusively the opinion of the Ultra collective. All rights dependent on the copyright policy of the original source of the text, ultrainput.com copyright policy and authors themselves.No institution or individual has financially supported this reader. Ultra collective wishes to express its gratitude and thanks to all contributing authors in this reader. efik Tatli, Ultra Collective / ultrainput.com, Bosnia-Herzegovina, April, 2011. ultrainput.com 4

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 Leban | Eu - Visione 1. Sebastjan Leban EU - Visione What is todays Europe? Some call it the new world, the land of new opportunity, some on the other hand name it a fortress, an unjust system of quasi tolerance behind which dark mechanisms have been operating interruptedly for centuries. Some might even call it the new fascist dream that is veiled under the false promise of equality that has at its basis only the formation of the new Empire conquered not by brute force but by market economy and the mediation of western capitalist values. The more one analyses it, the more complex the above-mentioned relation becomes. One thing is certain, there exist many truths as also many realities that can be read differently and simultaneously, but regardless of what we are being told or how we interpret the situation, we cant deny a strict neoliberal policy by way of which our contemporaneity is being formed. Since we are living in a globalized era where capital went worldwide, it seems unavoidable to analyze it in order to grasp not just the surface of it but to be able to get inside, to see what it is made of and how does it taste. The power is always in relation to domination and oppression. As stated by Foucault: In a society such as ours, there are manifold relations of power which permit, characterise and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourse of truth, which operates through and on the basis of this association. It is this same truth that is subjected to power and vice versa. At the same time Foucault links power and truth to right, the right of the sovereign to ultrainput.com 6

 Leban | Eu - Visione rule, to declare a state of exception, to execute its power over the citizens. This right, according to Foucault, does not include only laws but the whole complex of apparatuses, institutions and regulations that: transmit[s] and put[s] in motion relations that are not relations of sovereignty, but of domination. And it is exactly this domination that I want to emphasize in relation to the economy of discourse of truth branded by the EU. A case in point is the erasure of differences between the states included in EU. I am not referring just to differences evidenced by the fact that some of the member states are old colonial powers that have built their power and fortune by subjugation and dispossession, but also by the fact that the motivation behind the unification is not oriented socially but strictly economically. However, no matter how good this unification may be, many issues remain unsolved and unclear. Kosovo is one such example that, if analyzed, forces us to ask what were/are the EU interests in its recognition. In the present moment, Kosovo represents a form of colonization typical of the neoliberal expansive logic of capital, the contemporary colonization strategy whose parallels are implemented in different parts of the world and to which different geopolitical plans and strategies are applied. This goes on simultaneously at two levels: firstly, it is established through the mediation of Western capitalist values conveyed by the system through visual messages based on the use of white, Christian, and heterosexual values. Secondly, the EU introduces the strategy of subjugation implemented through political, economical and cultural control, which means that capital investments, equities, and privatization as also education, art, the media, etc., are the means of controlling and governing the social structure in a given country or geographical area. A perfect example of what is just being told is shown in the commercial Kosovo: The Young European where a group of youngsters are making the puzzle of Kosovo that is then taken up in the skies by balloons and, in a second moment, put again on the ground. If we were to paraphrase the meaning of the lyrics that goes:

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 Leban | Eu - Visione its time to start over, time to join it. The sky open minded today, I am feeling the life that I want to coming to me we could say that the act of putting the puzzle on the ground represents exactly the dreams that vanishes as soon as it hits the EU reality. As stated by Albin Kurti, after the year 1999., Kosovo escaped from prison but entered into a hospital. In this hospital Kosovo is allegedly free, but in an incubator as a newborn. This new born, according to the Internationals, has no political will and is not a subject that can decide for it self. In this respect it is meant to stay in the hospital. Kurti concludes its thesis by saying that the liberation Kosovo got is a liberation from arbitrary, brutal and physical violence anywhere and anytime but not much more than that. In this respect the commercial Kosovo: The Young European shows exactly the economy of discourse of truth run by the EU. To go further into the matter, we need to analyze the visa regime to which this young European country is forced. As stated by Isabel Strhle: The degree of isolation becomes particularly obvious when comparing it to the number of visa-free travel destinations open to citizens of other countries. The NGO Forum 2015 calculated that an application for a Schengen visa costs on average 124; the average wage of a Kosovar, however, is around 200. Apart from that, the report claims that Kosovars are the most frequently refused applicants for Schengen visas in the Balkans. Also in this case the youth is particularly affected: of those between 18 and 25 years old and unemployed, the chances of obtaining a visa are minimal. Even students have trouble getting a visa, despite their having been accepted by their host university, since they have to provide proof, either through their bank account or in the form of a scholarship confirmation, that they possess the estimated sum for monthly expenses for the whole period of their studies in advance. What are the collateral facts, the unseen reality behind the EU expansion? Where are the death bodies of EUs economies of discourse of truth? Does liberte, egalite and fraternite really mean that every man is born with

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 Leban | Eu - Visione inalienable and indefeasible rights or are rights just brands by way of which the apparatus mediates its propaganda exactly to diminish them? By protecting its vision and expanding its dream and its brand of free movement, the EU insurrected a fence on its external borders to prevent illegal entrance, and appointed Frontex (EU External Borders Agency) to do the job. Ever since Frontex was established, the number of people that drowned and died on the way is reported to have increased drastically as they are forced to travel longer distances in order to avoid control executed by Frontex. Frontex presents itself as an organ assuring freedom, security and justice, whereas in fact it is an institutionalized preventive control agency with the same function as a watchdog except that Frontex is not located inside the fence (save its symbolic headquarter) from where it protects its property, but it carries out control and security from outside on the other side of the fence. The situation is no different on the Spain-Morocco border (Ceuta and Melilla) where the EU has erected an iron fence intended to secure the border against illegal crossing. As described by Corinna Milborn, in Ceuta and Melilla there is a six-meter high iron fence made of steel and barbed wire, every 40 meters there is a watchtower, directional microphones, spotlights, a teargas system. The area is protected by more than 1,200 border guards whose role it is to prevent refugees from entering the EU. So what is the actual state of the processes creating the EU-vision? The EU brought us freedom of movement. Yes, but what is the trigger? Chiefly, the free float of goods and capital, and only after that, the free movement for EU citizens inside the EU internal borders. This is of course fantastic if you live inside the EU and have enough money to travel and enjoy the whole ranges of commodities that such a vision offers. If by chance you have time you can also taste how it is to feel, to breathe, to live illegality by simply downloading the game Frontiers. The game basically enables a player to experience life on both side of the border as the authors say. The project is supported by the European Cultural Foundation and other influential EU private and public institutions. As described on the ECF page:

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 Leban | Eu - Visione a beautiful, gritty, ground-breaking gaming project available as a free download, Frontiers is accompanied by a detailed website containing info on migration and integration issues. Although Frontiers is presented as a socially aware project on the problem of migration, many things testify to its questionable criticality. These can be found in many of the statements where the authors describe the game as follows: Race for the Moroccan-Spanish fence line in Ceuta and make it safely to the other side. Should you fail, you will find yourself in the Saharan desert with 600 km to go until you make it to the border. The reality of the six-meter high iron fence made of steel and barbed wire, where every 40 meters there is a watchtower, with directional microphones, spotlights and a teargas system is thus reduced to fiction. The real obstacles, persecution, death, starvation, pain become a means for the production of commodities for that same subject that moves freely within the EU borders. The bionecropolitical gets to its purest form. It is precise through the game fictivisation that the player is allowed to be simultaneously the executioner and the victim. When do we cross the border of being socially engaged into just taking advantage of a serious problematic for our personal interest? What are the consequences of translating the problematic of migration, its horrifying reality into a game? Creating a fictivisation and naming it life or, even worse, the experience of life? Of course, one can understand the right purpose of the authors of the project who try, by approaching the migration problematic through the medium of a computer game, to reach a wider part of the population. However, what they really do is to reproduce exactly that same reality that the project is supposed to criticise. Everything is brought to the level of fiction where there are thousands possibilities to die and start all over again until you finally make it or even, as it is customary with the known games, you just type the right cheat that gives you unlimited health to finish the game without difficulty. The problem of such fictivisation is that death ultrainput.com 10

 Leban | Eu - Visione and its reproduction become even more alienated. Likewise questionable is the position of EU, which, on the one hand, founds agencies for preventing illegal entrances, and on the other, finances such projects, branding them as examples of excellent praxis. Twelve Points of Departure In many of my previous texts I started to question the relation between biopolitcs and necropolitics and have also investigated their dialectic relation and how they were used (and still are) to (re)shape society. If biopolitics involves the regulation of life, necropolitics involves its deregulation through the regulation and production of death. Therefore, biopolitics (Agamben) and necropolitics (Mbembe) are not diametrically opposed, but on the contrary, they constantly complement and upgrade one another through the imperialism of circulation (Grzinic). This last allows the capitalist matrix to carry out contemporary processes of subjugation, exploitation and oppression differently in different parts of the world. If we further analyze the relation of biopolitics vs. necropolitics, I can state that we face a bionecropolitical contemporaneity that has never been divided into bio and necro, but have since ever formed a homogeneous strategy of governmentality. Life and death cant be split up into two worlds, they represents the dual same of one reality the capitalist one. In order to get a clearer picture on contemporary Europe, it is essential for us to go back in the past where the foundations of todays EU had been placed. It is the year 1950. and Europe is still recovering from the atrocities of the WWII when the idea of the united Europe started to take place. On 9 May 1950 Robert Schuman (French foreign minister) proposed to establish a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). As it is stated on the official EU webpage Europe in 12 lessons: In countries which had once fought each other, the production of coal and steel would be pooled under a common High Authority. In a practical but also richly symbolic way, the raw materials of war were being turned into instruments of reconciliation and peace. ultrainput.com 11

 Leban | Eu - Visione When continuing reading the 12 points file, one gets quickly in difficulty since it becomes obvious that a series of questionable statements is included inside the text, among many the following: the European Union encouraged German unification after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. When the Soviet empire crumbled in 1991, the former communist countries of central and Eastern Europe, after decades under the authoritarian yoke of the Warsaw Pact, decided that their future lay within the family of democratic European nations. However, the text fails to mention that the fall of the Berlin wall and communism with it is a part of the expansionist logic of capital. For centuries, capital has absorbed all alternative systems, firstly subordinating them, then taking their place to finally erase them for good. This is what happened, specifically in Europe, with socialism that saw its symbolic decline in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Let us be precise and not nave. Nothing is written in per se. There is always a reason, an agenda behind! If by any chance the reader stops at chapter 11 with the title European union on the world stage and the subtopic on Africa one will immediately notice that there is a basic discrepancy between the written general concern for the developing nation and the diction used to describe it. By referring to the period of colonization and stating that the relations between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa dated a long way back, and that decolonization, which began in the early 1960s turned this link into a different kind of association between sovereign countries, means to proclaim that the master-slave dialectics ceases to exist within the limits of (de)colonization. Nowhere in the text either the colonizers or the guilty are mentioned or a clear condemnation of colonization can be found together with the atrocities it brought about. No, the EU condemned Communism and Socialism putting them side by side with Fascism and Nazism, but it is incapable of condemning its own genealogy of horror. Moreover, one might even get the impression that some strange alien force were the colonizer and that Europe as such (its old forces of power) had ultrainput.com 12

 Leban | Eu - Visione nothing to do with it. But the facts are more than clear. Colonialism was and continues to be a significant part in European (as also Western) genealogy of domination. To this do not testify just the well-known contemporary cases such as Kosovo and Iraq, but most vividly Cotonou Agreement which beside trade, shifts the old mode of exploitation (by brut force) to the newer one (political, cultural and economical control). In this relation we can understand the Cotonou Agreement as the renewed attempt (since it followed the Lom Convention from 1975) to colonize anew the African, Caribbean and Pacific States. The main objectives of the agreement are promoted to be the reduction and eradication of poverty as also of the gradual integration of African, Caribbean and Pacific States into the global economy, while adhering to the aims of sustainable development. But considering Europes past, one would seriously doubt it to be its only purpose. Thus the EU-vision continues to construct its agenda that includes the organization of our lives. To conclude this introductory investigation on EU, its politics, policy and collateral effects, I would like to draw on Etienne Balibars thesis, which states that today we face two major obstacles to the idea of really democratic European states. One is the lack of a unified European social politics and the other is the authoritarian regime of a border of exclusion for membership in Europe. This fence that primarily excludes, functions also as a distinction marker that reminds us of who is the master and who the slave, who has the right to enter in the elite country-like club of the civilized and who doesnt. In this regard I still today vividly remember the first English class in the primary school where we were given an English name and a name of the town were everyone of us was located. I was John from Liverpool. Twice a week we had a block of two hours and each time you had to present yourself, so I stood up and loudly said: I am John. I am twelve years old. I am from Liverpool. One might wonder why would this be considered problematic. It is a simple ultrainput.com 13

 Leban | Eu - Visione diction, a help for the child to more easily immerse in the character, a learning toll. But does this explanation suffice? Does it really reflect the whole colonization apparatuses behind the linguistic implication of such a learning method? Why couldnt I simply be Sebastjan, a twelve year-old from Nova Gorica, Slovenia, at the time still part of Yugoslavia. Why did they have me change my name, relocate me? Perhaps this relocation is exactly the same as the one present in the project Frontiers, of course slightly modified and updated with the new technology. Today I am still Sebastjan, based in Slovenia, but with one more blue starred flag and with an additional citizenship of a state(s) to which seems I dont really belong except in economical terms. References
Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Others Writings, New York, 1980 Sebastjan Leban, The Strategy of the Modernisation of the Ideological and Structural Matrix of Neoliberalism, Reartikulacija no.5, 2008 Albin Kurti, Excerpts from the interview Kosovo a Permanent State of Exception, Leban/Kleindienst, 2011 http://www.kosovo-young.com, May 2010 Isabel Strhle, Rethinking Kosovo: The New Born and The Young Europeans, Reading images in the post-Yugoslav context, forthcoming Sebastjan Leban, Import/Export: The Logic of Contempt in Contemporary Neoliberal Imperialism, Reartikulacija no.3, 2008 http://www.frontiers-game.com/, June 2010 Sebastjan Leban, De-linking from Capital and the Colonial Matrix of Power: Class Racialization and the

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 Leban | Eu - Visione
(De)regulation of Life, Pavilion no.14, 2009 http://europa.eu/abc/12lessons/lesson_1/index_en.htm, May 2010 http://europa.eu/legislation_summaries/development/african_caribbean_pacific_states/r12101_en.ht m, May 2010 Etienne Balibar, At the Borders of Europe, http://www.makeworlds.org/node/80, May 2010

***
Sebastjan Leban is working in the field of theory and art. At the moment he is enrolled at the PhD programme at the University of Nova Gorica, Institute of Philosophy at Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences, Slovenia. He is one of the co-founder and co-editor of Reartikulacija, a platform for radical critical analysis (http://www.reartikulacija.org/). He is a lecturer of Radical Critical Analysis at the Academy of Visual Arts (AVA) in Ljubljana.

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge

2. Lina Dokuzovi and Eduard Freudmann Fortified Knowledge: From Supranational Governance to Translocal Resistance
Originally published in The Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise, Volume 3, Dossier 2: On Europe, Education, Global Capitalism and Ideology, (Center for the Global Studies and the Humanities, Duke University, USA) http://trinity.duke.edu/globalstudies/volume-3-dossier-2-on-europe-education- global-capitalism-and-ideology-2

Contemporary educational structures are a basis for capital reproduction, a laboratory for the creation of branded epistemologies that are the center and starting point for the reproduction of these concepts inside and beyond the walls that fortify it. International economic crisis is being remedied with a knowledge economy, at the cost of those constituting knowledge production. One of the consequences of the expanse of education has been the geopolitical restructuring of spaces of education, not only as another sphere of life appropriated by capital, but in terms of national narratives on a supranational level, echoing the corporate agendas in and around education. That expansion builds areas and zones, in which a greater marketability and exchange of education units can take place on behalf of supranational market agendas. The consequences of this process are manifold and as interlinked as capital and nation, exposing the two as joint partners in the enterprise of the knowledge economy. Supranational market expansion challenges traditional national borders, with the production of profit nevertheless regulated by a center, which creates hierarchical strata of outlying territories, the bottommost of which constitutes the zone. This shifting base forms the foundation which ebbs and flows in relation to the needs or crises of the center. The consequences of this structure have echoed worldwide, ranging from lack of access to education, to the loss of homes, to student debt, to an increase in police forces on university ultrainput.com 16

 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge campuses, regulating and preventing discord, worldwide. However, such conditions within education are not being tolerated and the antagonism which has erupted, despite and due to the forces of regulation, has expanded as far as the problems being contested. Individuals have been protesting around the world. Just as the crises are of a transgressive nature, expanding to all spheres of life, so too has the nature of the protests. The demands of the protestors have extended to a critique of the commodification of all spheres of life. People in Europe have been protesting against the current Bologna Process reforms, in the US against high tuition fees and cutbacks, Indians in Australia against structural racism and abuse, and in the developing world against the ever-changing institutions following Structural Adjustment Policies implemented decades ago, to name a few. In the US, protestors have referred to the war on our universities, in which public funds are invested in financing the war effort and prisons, rather than invested in improving the school system. All the while, education, militias and prisons become increasingly privatized, placing public moneys into private pockets. These worldwide issues have a common element. They are part of a complex system, building a knowledge economy, as a purported solution to a failing global capitalist order. The necessity has come for a struggle that transgresses national borders. As educational areas become supranational, the manifold protests have, for the first time, reached a transnational level. However, a new logic of resistance may need to be assessed, as the entanglement of capital and education examine the roots of supranationality within capitalized education. This analysis will, therefore, approach how supranationality substantiates a center, semi-periphery, peripheries and zones of suspension in regard to education, following a supranational market logic, accumulating profit from education and using education as a tool for reproducing that very logic. The concept of transnational struggle against supranational structures will thus be questioned in terms of the entanglement of state and capital, proposing alternatives for a struggle against both capitalism and nationalism in their variegated and obfuscated forms. ultrainput.com 17

 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge Opening World Markets US Adjustment Policies The commodification and homogenization of knowledge and education are grounded in a long history of international structural development policy that was conceived and installed by the US in order to ensure its position as the center, dominating and exploiting its peripheries. In terms of regulating the center, standardization and evaluation have served to filter through the institutions where filtration by monetary investment is unavailable, such as public primary-level education. For example, the No Child Left Behind Act1 has allowed for such radical transformations as entire staffs of under-performing public schools, which have failed to satisfy world class standards, being fired the consequences of which are the segregation or gentrification of the social, which in nearly all cases, more evidently underperform economically, justifying their reform and greater financial investment, but under the terms of upgrading such schools into private industrial research facilities.2 The intervention of financial rescue brings with it the consequences of capitalized regulation of formerly public spheres, as a private-public partnership, with consequences most heavily experienced by those not financially endowed enough to intervene. Among poverty-stricken regions suffering the most, the social space is essentially cleansed, providing new standards and a new production of knowledge. In terms of regulation of profit on a global level, the dependency theory provides an important model for analysis. Officially introduced in 1949, but relating to earlier Marxist analysis, Hans Singer and Ral Prebisch, in two separate papers, published what later became known as the Singer-Prebisch thesis. It claims that a center and a periphery must exist in which the periphery provides the resources and cheap labor, stabilizing and supporting the development and wealth of the center in a traditional colonial format. Immanuel
1 A legal act of US standards-based educational reform, emanating from the assumption, that the establishment and assessment of measurable standards would improve individual outcomes in education. 2 See for example: http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/4411

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge Wallerstein, however, introduced the semi-periphery in his World Systems Theory, claiming that a far more complex and shifting relationship between colonizer and colonized exists, with the semi-periphery playing an increasingly significant role as the balancer of the system and the disguise of the wealth gap between the developed and the developing in globalism. This analysis, however, does not take Wallersteins theory as a given. It draws from that economic model in order to create parallels to education in regard to the development of economic education areas and the production of zones for better understanding effective methods of protest. Wallersteins theory provides a point of departure, which implies the inherent coloniality in capitalist expansion. However, specific economic and structural reform processes need to be considered in order to elaborate educations role in not only colonial or capitalist systems, but also in neoliberal capitalist ones, taking a closer look at the relationship between state and capital. In order to analyze the transgressive commodification and privatization of public goods and commons, opening the door for the development of neoliberal capitalism and new relations between state and capital, the policies and structures initiated by the Bretton Woods System must be examined. The underlying Bretton Woods Agreement was signed by all of the Allied nations in 1944 as a US rescue mission for the ravaged European continent during WWII. In exchange, an international monetary system was introduced, which established homogenous capitalist market logic, based on the standardized exchange rate of currencies relayed to the massive US gold reserves. The Agreement founded the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (later to become the World Bank Group) in order to control and regulate the system. The US encouraged long-term adjustment policies through the system, promoting European and Japanese competitiveness in order to rebuild their devastated economies, turning both into US semi-peripheries. This would form the basis of a system of triangular trade, in which the US would trade at a tremendous profit between the developing nations of the periphery, expanding the market and expropriating raw materials. This surplus would be sent to semi-peripheral Europe to rebuild ultrainput.com 19

 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge the war-torn economies, providing the US as the main market for goods and as a salvation army. A continuation of this US salvation policy of development aid, following Bretton Woods, was further articulated in the Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP), of the IMF and World Bank. SAPs were expanded for restructuring developing regions in favor of producing dependence on the sovereign nation. They can be understood as the Bretton Woods policies for the periphery, rather than those, which have been granted to build up the semi-periphery. The development aid of SAPs was more likely to establish debt slavery and long-term adjustment than the short-term adjustment policies which provided a semi-periphery for fertile competition with Europe and Japan. SAPs granted aid in exchange for opening up markets for foreign investment, a devaluing of the local currency and a privatization of formerly public systems, resources or services, such as water, healthcare or education. Education played a significant role, establishing the developing world as a testing field, maintained by the colonial ideological basis that education was necessary for that very development to proceed. This led to educational reforms in South America and Africa during the 1970s and 1980s that have left irreparable damage, making privatized education more inaccessible rather than opening it up. The parallel process of implementing rewritten histories and corrected knowledges was the ideological basis of Structural Adjustment Policies, justifying the very reforms taking place. As developing regions were aided under terms that implemented debt slavery, and the first measures to eradicate socialism were made through SAPs in socialist-aligned regions of the Global South, transitional regions would gain a significant position in creating new semi-peripheries as Europe rose to be a substantial economic competitor to the US. In order to ideologically justify the economic expansion to socialist regions which created a great hindrance to opening global markets an eradication of the socialist evil would be purported through the salvation mission, led by the Washington Consensus a ultrainput.com 20

 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge series of regulations, supporting open market ethics and a privatization of previously socialized goods and services, implemented by the financial institutions set up by Bretton Woods for opening up the region to capitalization processes through development aid following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Socialism would essentially be eradicated worldwide during the Second Cold War,3 allowing a complete transition towards global capitalism. This marked the moment that the global capitalist salvation process succeeded, implementing a new semi-periphery and a new competition between the USA and Europe, based on the level of development of the former Eastern Bloc, in which both centers were avidly investing, opening the new era of transition and liberal democratization. The neoliberal capitalist turn, following the Bretton Woods System and its many extensions, would establish a neocolonial platform for financial development. What was and still is referred to as the liberation of territories and a salvation mission of bringing democracy to the oppressed world, merely echoes colonial salvation missions, fashioned for the expropriation of wealth and resources from outlying territories and the appropriation of everything that produces it. As Bobby Subhabrata Banerjee states, in an imperialism without colonies, we can now refer to a democracy without choices.4 European Recovery Paving the Way for a Competitive Knowledge Economy Supranationality would become the method necessary to strengthen Western Europes position in an approaching neoliberally-capitalized, neocolonized world. As the disastrous laceration of WWII weakened Europe, it would become important that the US domination and salvation mission remain within limited
3 The period of the Cold War between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979) and the rise of Michail

Gorbachev (1985), with increasing US-Soviet tensions and a change in Western policy from dtente to more confrontation against the Soviet Union.
4 Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, Histories of Oppression and Voices of Resistance: Towards a Theory of the Translocal in Reartikulacija, no. 9, Ljubljana, 2009; http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=612

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge boundaries of fertile competition. Following the US establishment of strong capitalist trading areas and the parallel communist bloc, the project of the European Community would begin. Formed according to the US format of the military-industrial complex,5 Western Europe would begin to form supranational areas based on the pillars of the military, economy and resources: the Western European Union, the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community. Each of these constellations would depart from the basic assumption of the principles of human rights and the anti-tyranny6 consensus of the participating countries, safeguarded by the political collaboration of the Council of Europe and its European Court of Human Rights. These structures would lay down the basic framework for the approaching European Union, an open area of economic and political union. With the establishment of the EU in 1993, expanding the market area in Europe, a long-winded integration process of the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe would begin, enforcing guidelines for development by which the East should become civilized enough to enter Europe, all the while supporting competition between the US and Europe on developing soil. This should additionally be viewed in terms of what was taking place during the Cold War. While the Cold War, in contrast to a hot war, was not violently fought between the nations which wagered war, their dirty work was being done in the outlying peripheral regions of the developing world. The expropriation of goods and resources, cheap labor and opening of markets to capital and financing civil wars in the periphery maintained a perpetual state of exception7 in the regions which were not recognized as part of the war. The peripheral battles could by no means be considered cold. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in
5 The military-industrial complex is a notion referring to the interdependent relation of governments, national armed forces and the industrial sector in research, development, production, use, and support for military training, weapons, equipment, and facilities within the national defense and security policy. 6 See e.g. Winston Churchills speech on the academic youth in Zurich 1946: Let Europe arise!, http://www.eiz.uzh.ch/fileadmin/Dokumente/2008/ChurchillSpeech.pdf 7 According to Giorgio Agamben, the state of exception describes increased state power in purported times of crisis.

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge 1989, a new zoned global market would arise in which nearly all regions would be open to intervention by the Center. The cold tensions between the center and its competition simmered down, but the unrecognized hot portion would continue into the present. This situation describes the regions open to capitalization at the time, however, following the opening of the Eastern Bloc after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the conditions of capitalist expansion and development aid would reach and open the area. In order to protect the economic and political area of the EU, claimed to be an open area without borders, a system of detention camps and zones of suspension8 fortify the borders to the outlying developing territories, forming what is criticized as fortress Europe, a term originally coined in reference to the Nazi occupation of Europe. However, applying the Nazi propaganda term to current conditions becomes problematic as it likens the methods of the German Wehrmacht to those of the contemporary EU border and migration regimes. Therefore, we propose the use of the term fortified Europe instead. Referencing Balibar,9 who analyzes the transformation of the border into the zone, Marina Grini states that: We do not talk about the East and West of Europe anymore, but of the transformation of a whole territory into a zone that functions in such a way as a (new) border. The question of borders disappears in order for the physiognomy of borders to change radically. She claims former Eastern Europe constitutes such a border zone for testing the whole territory. However, as the integration process expands, these zones continue to shift and reappear in different constellations. In terms of shifting borders and the creation of zones, it is important to recognize the nearly complete EU integration process. The only exceptions, however, are the non-Christian nations of Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania, which
8 Per Agamben, indefinite suspension of the law characterizes the state of exception. 9 See Marina Grini, Analysis of the exhibition Gender Check Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe,, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna, 12/2009; http://eipcp.net/policies/grzinic/en

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge have instead been converted to zones, deemed unworthy for the salvation missions dictated by the cultural superiority of Christianity. This example clarifies the terms under which open market ideology functions coupling liberal capitalism with conservatism or neoliberalism with neoconservatism exposing coloniality in the salvation of the undeveloped as the very basis of capitalization. Additionally, in order to continually fortify the center and extend the logic of salvation, the EU has shifted the focus of its policy to the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), already established in Maastricht in 1992 and largely expanded in the Lisbon Treaty of 2007/2009, establishing a joint military policy, which aims at forming an EU army for military missions outside of EU territory. This logic must reeducate the citizenry in order to gain consensus to its advancement. With the example of SAPs, it can be observed how restructuralization under capitalization begins with the privatization of commons, implanting itself within education, regulating itself through violently fortified borders and reproducing its own logic through reeducation. Knowledge Economy Areas As Europe began the process of emancipation from the economic dominance of the USA following WWII, education would take on an increasingly significant position. This would allow Europe to elevate its global economic status from a semi-periphery to a center of power, supplementing other political interests such as economic, legal and military intentions with educational restructuring. While Europe lagged in scientific development during WWII, the USA excelled. To catch up and challenge the US foothold in scientific development, Europe would invest in a growing engagement in Research and Technological Development (RTD). In order to increase Europes competitiveness with the USA, it would enhance intra-European academic mobility and promote Europes profile as a study and research destination for non-European students. This intra-European academic mobility would be structured through the creation of ultrainput.com 24

 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) aimed for 2010. That structure has been supported by the launch of the Bologna Process in 1999, whose joint primary focus, however, is the development of a European Research Area (ERA) incepted in 2000, in supporting Research and Technological Development (RTD). With the elevation of Europe from a semi-periphery to a center, influenced by the successful knowledge economic model, Australia would also enter the race by initiating the Brisbaine Communiqu in 2006, targeting an Asia Pacific Higher Education Area for competition with the US and aspiring EU models. Australia has subsequently gained significant economic success, based on incoming students, seen as guest consumers,10 represented statistically as an educational export. The area under the Brisbane Communiqu, or the broader Asia-Pacific region, includes the 52 countries of the region invited to the Asia- Pacific Education Ministers Meeting in April 2006.11 This region subsequently composes Australias periphery. It is important to understand that the functionality of the center-periphery model as a territorial strategy of dominance is based on the control and regulation of mobility and migration. We therefore, use the term fortified knowledge centers to refer to how this relates to the fortification around the knowledge economy areas, as the EHEA and EU are congruent with the EU border and migration regime supporting the necropolitical12 border defense projects of Frontex, not only accepting the consequences of drowning boat refugees, but enforcing it.13
10 Ben Rosenzweig, International Student Struggles Transnational Economies, Guest Consumers and Processes of Restructuring in Mutiny, no. 48, 2010, http://jura.org.au/files/jura/Mutiny%2048%20WebV3.pdf 11 For a list of the countries, see: http://www.brisbanecommunique.deewr.gov.au/region.htm 12 Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics as the subjugation of life to the power of death in Necropolitics in Public Culture, 15:1, winter 2003, pp. 11-40. 13 See e.g.: http://www.proasyl.de/fileadmin/proasyl/fm_redakteure/Flyer_PDF/FRONTEX.pdf; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOuFo5egBqE; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAAPNkBKrzo

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge By aiming to declare all of its neighboring countries safe third countries14 and financing massive detention centers there, the EU creates a semi-peripheral buffer zone, into which any asylum seeker who is caught in the EU can be deported to without the EU legally violating the Geneva Convention. This outsources the responsibility of accepting asylum seekers, subjects them to cruel conditions the EU effectively imposes, meanwhile blaming the conditions on the underdeveloped conditions of the outlying regions. Those who are able to enter the center from the peripheries through means of educational mobility are strictly regulated and framed accordingly to work force demands, supplying cheap labor to the center, allotting them a position at the base of society. Simultaneously, however, the appeal of Europe to researchers and students outside of the center is exacerbated. Incoming students are seen as guest consumers during their studies and as potential intellectual or scientific upgrades after their studies. Thereby a core of wealthy consumers who can afford the investment are welcomed, those who arrive at the base and filter into a useful elite can be granted some eventual rights to stay, whereas the most excluded group gets sent back to the peripheries as sediment following the expiry of granted access. This flexible, yet regulated mobility arrangement has introduced the same terminology into education as used in economic trade, of areas, such as the EHEA, ERA, etc. Is it also significant to maintain the difference here between mobility, which is protected by law, and migration, which is punishable by law. In these areas, maximal mobility of goods, services and capital allow an unlimited production of profit. The outlying regions in which movement can be sanctioned can be defined in terms of the aforementioned zones, defined by Balibar, which function to replace the traditional national borders. These zones are regulated through a permanent state of suspension or exception. Such zones can be the outlying regions of Europe, never to be integrated into the EHEA or EU, or in the example of the entire region of sub-Saharan Africa, a region not
14 A "third country" is any nation which is not a member state or party to the contract of a bilateral/multilateral or supranational structure, such as, and primarily referring to the Schengen area.

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge civilized enough to enter bilateral or multilateral trade, but simply support the developed world as resource-rich bargain bins.15 The Center When examining the development of the Bologna Process leading to the EHEA, the creation of the center and its peripheries becomes clear. The signatories of the Bologna Declaration are congruent with the Member States of todays EU16 and form the core of the EHEA or its center. Being inside the borders of the Schengen area, the countries citizens purportedly increase the intra-European academic mobility as they enjoy the freedom of movement and are therefore enabled to study, research and teach in any location within the Schengen area. As EU citizens, they are additionally protected from discrimination based on their national origin e.g. they cannot be charged more tuition fees than residents, scholarships are available to them, they have the right to work and make a living principles that are guaranteed by the EU judiciary. The Semi-Periphery The part of the EHEA outside of the EU forms its semi-periphery. This includes the Western Balkans, Turkey, Russia, the Ukraine, Moldova, the Caucasus Republics, thereby all non-EU countries on the Eurasian landmass west of the Caspian Sea17 and (since March 2010) Kazakhstan. The semi-periphery is defined through all signatories of the European Cultural Convention18 and the Member States of the Council of Europe (the only exception is Belarus who signed the previous, but not the latter). Its citizens benefit from the
15 Term expanded by Khadija Sharife in DRCs Magic Dust: Who Benefits? http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/61992 16 Except for Cyprus, which entered the Bologna Process two years later in 2001. 17 Except Belarus, Monaco and San Marino.

18 The European Cultural Convention was signed by the members of the Council of Europe in 1954 to achieve a greater unity between its members for the purpose [] of safeguarding and realizing the ideals and principles which are their common heritage. http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/018.htm

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge comparability of the national education systems, therefore, they can transfer credits and easily continue their studies in the center in case they are selected and permitted to enter the Schengen area where they are subjected to a number of (nationally-varying) discriminations such as the obstruction to work for money and the simultaneous obligation to prove the possession of an amount of money, which exceeds the maximal allowed annual income.19 The Periphery The periphery of the EHEA is comprised of the countries of Northern Africa,20 the Middle East21 and Central Asia,22 all of them participating in Tempus, a vehicle for the promotion and exchange of Bologna ideas to countries surrounding the EU.23 According to the Bologna Process Conference Berlin 2003, there is no perspective to integrate these countries into the EHEA, because they are not signatories of the European Cultural Convention, therefore, they are not considered to share the common cultural heritage of Europe and safeguard and encourage the development of European culture.24 In the case of the periphery, the domination strategy the export of epistemology and braindrain of the zones is established with regions and countries in other parts of the world by promoting the idea and practice of regional cooperation and through practical cooperation and dissemination of experiences,25 meaning
19 To get a student visa prolonged in Austria, the applicant has to prove being in possession of 7,055 euro. A womans lower-level annual income after taxes in Austria in 2008 was 6,491 Euro. http://www.statistik.at/web_de/static/nettojahreseinkommen_der_unselbstaendig_erwerbstaetigen_1997_ bis_2008_020055.pdf 20 Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia 21 Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria 22 Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan 23 See the World Education Services, Volume 20, Issue 4, April 2007, http://www.wes.org/ewenr/07apr/feature.htm 24 European Cultural Convention, http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/018.htm

25 Pavel Zgaga, Looking out: The Bologna Process in a Global Setting, p. 13, Norwegian Ministry for Education and Research 2006, http://www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/bologna/documents/WGR2007/Bologna_Process_in_glob al_setting_finalreport.pdf

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge to advocate the need to expand cooperation, exchange and scholarship programs for administrators, faculty and students from non-Bologna countries.26 With that aim, Europe is even fishing in foreign waters by launching academic exchange programs with Latin America, such as Alfa27 or attaching priority to the creation of the EU-LAC (European Union, Latin America and Caribbean) Common Area of Higher Education, geared towards mobility and cooperation.28 Interestingly, there is no country which is part of both the EHEA or its periphery and the Australia-dominated Asia Pacific Higher Education Area, with the exception of Turkey. This precise apportionment of the territories can be seen as a continuation of the territorial demarcation processes that the colonial empires carried out with their colonial conferences until the 20th century. The establishment of the EHEA, with its exclusive and inclusive mechanisms of the center and its peripheries, not only closely relates to the fortification of Europe by utilizing the same center and buffer zones, but its function depends on the disfranchisement of excluded and included individuals. So it is necessary to not only refer to fortified Europe in terms of its migration politics and border regime, but to understand the fortification as a transgressive logic being gradually applied to every sphere of life regulated by EU policy to, therefore, understand the EHEA as a fortified knowledge center.29 So what is at stake is that the center of the First Capitalist World (USA) dominating its peripheries (Western Europe and the developing world) was ruptured within the last two decades into three centers with the emerging EU and Australia who established structures for education and research areas in
26 See: World Education Services, Volume 20, Issue 4, April 2007, http://www.wes.org/ewenr/07apr/feature.htm 27 http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/where/latin-america/regional-cooperation/alfa/index_en.htm 28 See Article 52 of EU-LAC Declaration, http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/where/latin-america/regional- cooperation/eurosocial/documents/declaration_vienna_en.pdf 29 See the Edu-factory collective: The double crisis: living on the borders in EduFactory webjournal, zero issue, January 2010, p. 7; http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/webjournal/n0/Edu-factory.pdf

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge order to compete with the US and create their own profitable peripheries. The central position of the US territory, as the center of knowledge production, exporting its epistemology to rule and braindrain its periphery, is the result of hegemony of the US research and knowledge production system that lasts for decades worldwide.30 As Europe and Australia elevated themselves from a (semi-)periphery to a center at the expense of US domination, it is always possible for other (semi-)peripheral territories to do so, such as China and India.31 China and India, for example, are members of the BRIC nations Brazil, Russia, India and China the most rapidly developing economies in the world and those with the greatest investment in Africa (their periphery). Goldman Sachs argues that by 2050, the combined economies of the BRICs could eclipse the combined economies of the current richest countries of the world. Expanding Education as an Empire The dominant models of the educational areas of the center have expanded and linked to their peripheries globally, with the appeal of allowing the elevation to a semi-periphery, through multilateral trade agreements and academic exchange programs. Some significant emerging semi-peripheries can be seen in the Maghreb region and in South Africa, for example. The five states of Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia established the Maghreb Union in 1989 to promote a common market. It was envisioned by Muammar al-Gaddafi as a supranational Arab state, which has begun fertile competition and coordination with Europe, including acting as a regulator for African migrants into the EU.32
30 Immigration of scientists to the US reached its peak around WW II. Between 1933 and 1945, a significant number of scholars escaping Nazi persecution migrated to the US. After 1945, the US authorities imported scholars that had been serving the Nazi regime (see e.g. Operation Overcast or Project Paperclip). 31 See the Edu-factory collective: The Double Crisis: Living on the Borders in EduFactory webjournal, zero

issue, January 2010, p. 5.

32 For an account of Gaddafis exchange policy between the EU and African migration camp regimes in other parts of Africa, see Yohannes Woldemariam The Plight of Eritreas Boat People in: http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/59828

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge In December 2009, the International Conference for Knowledge-Based Economies for Creating Job Opportunities, Raising the Level of Competitiveness and Realizing Balanced Development was organized by the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), the World Bank and the Tunisian government. The Tunis Declaration, which emerged from it, calls for holding a world summit that should guarantee the Maghrebs transformation into a knowledge-economy based region. Additionally, the Declaration calls for establishing suitable mechanisms for enhancing cooperation and partnership, strengthening the role of private-sector enterprises and civil-society organizations, and coordinating contributions from specialized regional and international organizations.33 Algeria, however, urged by the Ministry of Educations disappointment with graduation statistics, has begun fining the parents of children who do not regularly attend school. On the other hand, many parents simply cannot afford to send their children to school, so while drastically disciplining and enforcing class division, investment is nonetheless made in order to bolster the knowledge economy area models.34 Zones stabilize the elevation and opening of entire regions. On January 26th 2010, the World Trade Organization Secretariat launched a new program of support for teaching, research and outreach activities at 14 universities in the developing world. International financial organizations and institutions (UNESCO, World Bank, etc.) are in favor of the adjustment of African universities to the Bologna model. This example demonstrates one of the attempts of the periphery to rise to a semi-periphery, however, the incompatibility with the common cultural heritage of Europe, inherently excludes the participation of, for example, Muslim countries, thereby merely supporting a continuation of a European panopticon model.
33 http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/features/2009/12/09/feature- 01 34 http://www.magharebia.com/cocoon/awi/xhtml1/en_GB/features/awi/features/2010/01/14/feature- 01

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge Nationalism and Transnational Struggle the Fortified Hofburg On March 12, 2010 the launch of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), as envisaged in the Bologna Declaration of 1999, was declared by Ministers of the participating 47 countries at the Bologna Ministerial Anniversary Conference in Vienna, a city which had been the site of massive education protests in late 2009, with several Universities squatted and tens of thousands demonstrating against the commodification of education and knowledge. After the protestors invited activists from all over the world to join them in a counter-summit and days of action challenging the official Bologna Summit, the Austrian police reactivated the original function of the Hofburg, which hosted the Bologna Ministerial Anniversary Conference, as a fortified castle. Thereby it applied the same structure of the fortified center, regulating its peripheries through domination on a micro-level, effective throughout fortified Europe and the fortified knowledge center. Therefore a micro- and macro-level analysis must be made in order to compare potentialities, action, resistance and policies. The Hofburg, Viennas Imperial Palace, is not only known for its royal past, but for Adolf Hitlers speech on the Hofburgs balcony on March 15, 1938, the annex of Austria to the German Reich to hundreds of thousands of raving Viennese after the Nazis took over power from the Austro-fascists. On January 29th, 2010, shortly before the Bologna Summit at the Hofburg, the police had a dress rehearsal for the Hofburgs fortification, during a ball held by far-right extremist fraternities, or Burschenschaften,35 in that very building. Some of them, such as the infamous Olympia, have close ties to neo-Nazism.36 In order to prevent
35 Burschenschaften are academic male societies in the German-speaking area. In Austria, they are primarily affiliated with pan-Germanism and a far-right-wing credo. Members of Burschenschaften periodically attack the Austrian Verbotsgesetz 1947, a legal act that banned the Nazi party, provided the legal framework for the process of de-Nazification, which suppresses any potential revival of Nazism and regulates the prohibition of denying or grossly minimizing the Shoah or other Nazi war crimes. It represents the anti- fascist consensus of the Austrian Second Republic. Lately its abolishment has not only been claimed by the far-right-wing Austrian Freedom Party (FP) that has been doing so since its inception, but also by the Akademikerbund, the academic association related to the conservative Austrian Peoples Party (VP). 36 The Olympia was suspended in 1961 by Austrian authorities, because it was involved in bombings in South Tyrol. After its reestablishment, it protested against the conviction of the Austrian neo-Nazi Gottfried

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge protestors from jeopardizing the event, the police closed the fortified Hofburg. A demonstration against the ball was forbidden by Viennese authorities; hundreds of assembling protestors were closed in by police and criminalized through penalties. 14 anti-fascist activists were arrested and at least 20 individuals were hospitalized after injury by police forces.37 Approximately one month later, as the first day of the Bologna Summit was held in the Hungarian parliament in Budapest, Viennas streets were populated with around 10,000 demonstrators. The main part of the protest led people to and ended in front of the Hofburgs main gate, which was closed off from the international protestors, creating a true fortified stronghold. This fortification of the Hofburg is not customary, nor do those involved recall such an action in their lifetimes. Meanwhile, participants were called out to join a series of blockade actions in the citys arteries surrounding the Hofburg. The protesters were separated into several groups, each serving to blockade a major route to the fortress within the citys semi-periphery in order to prevent the Ministers and their peons from accessing the fortified center. Several of the blockade attempts were successful as police became overwhelmed by the flexibility of the protestors. As these can be seen as actions against the divisions of center and semi-periphery on a micro-level, they gained significance because of an additional action in the citys periphery, when railroad tracks were blockaded on the route from Budapest to Vienna, forcing a transfer from the chartered trains to busses, delaying the Ministers and their cohorts arrival to Vienna by several hours.38
Kssel, according to the Verbotsgesetz in 1993 and invited several neo-Nazis for concerts or lectures, among them the British Holocaust denier David Irving (2005). The Olympia member, Martin Graf, was elected as Vice-President of the Austrian Parliament in 2008.
37 Press release noWKR Bndnis, January 2010; http://nowkr.wordpress.com/2010/01/31/pa- demonstrationsfreiheit-mit-brutaler-polizeigewalt-ausgehebelt 38 It is not clear if the tracks were really blocked (according to the report of a traveler) or if the transfer to busses was a preventative measure by the police who feared a blockade (as it is stated in the article of the Austrian Press Agency: http://relevant.at/wirtschaft/karriere/14685/bologna-ausflug-nach-wien- hindernissen.story).

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge The fact that the police were relatively subdued in their reaction to the blockades of fortress Hofburg (none injured, just five arrests) shows, that the micro- level comparison to fortified Europe and its fortified knowledge center drifts apart at the moment when the question of citizens and their rights comes into play: Those who challenge the system on the macro-level are oppressed with brutal restriction and absolute disfranchisement.39 In contrast, the protestors on the micro-level in Vienna were regarded as part of the macro-center, therefore enjoying all legal rights of European citizens, additionally regarded with a benevolent method of infantilization,40 indicating their recognized eligibility as potential future successors of the administration within the (micro-)center.41 However, in violation to the unwritten law that police are not to enter university grounds in Austria,42 Austrian universities have adopted policies of open repression, which had been carried out against education protestors worldwide, by calling the police to evacuate occupied spaces at the University of Vienna and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in December 2009. International Oppression As most of the university occupations and protests against the commodification of knowledge were reacted to with police violence and oppression, varied levels
39 See e.g. the recent case of a community of illegalized agricultural workers in Italy protesting against racist violations and unbearable living conditions that was attacked by a racist mob with firearms, Molotov- cocktails and blackjacks escalating in a pogrom in which the police did not intervene but instead reacted after some days by deporting the attacked to detention camps; http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/31/31894/1.html 40 See for example, how the protests were explained in the Budapest-Vienna Declaration as an outcome of lack of understanding from a missing explanation of the Bologna Process: Recent protests in some countries, partly directed against developments and measures not related to the Bologna Process, have reminded us that some of the Bologna aims and reforms have not been properly implemented and explained. (http://www.bmwf.gv.at/fileadmin/user_upload/bolognakonferenz/Budapest- Vienna_Declaration.pdf, Article 6) 41 See Lina Dokuzovi and Eduard Freudmann: Squatting the Crisis: On the Current Protests in Education and Perspectives on Radical Change, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna, 11/2009; http://eipcp.net/n/1260352849 42 The rector of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna even stated repeatedly: Das ist fr mich ein eisernes Gesetz: An der Universitt gibts keine Polizei. Trans. by authors: For me, that is a law inscribed in stone: there are to be no police in universities. See: http://www.malen-nach-zahlen.at/wp- content/uploads/Schmidt_Wulffen_keine_polizei_mp3.mp3

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge of brutality have depended on geopolitical locations, economic status, class and segregation. For example, several universities in Germany were evacuated by the police with teargas and beatings immediately after they were occupied.43 A student was severely beaten and 11 were arrested at the University of Zimbabwe, following arrests in Harare and Bulawayo the week before.44 In Melbourne, Australia a demonstration of 4,000 Indian students, protesting against racist assault, was violently broken up by police.45 Water cannons were used to disperse protesting university students in Johannesburg demanding free tertiary education for the poor.46 6 students were arrested for distributing flyers against the neoliberal university at Hosei University in Korea.47 17 activists were arrested for anti-racist demonstrations at the University of California Irvine48 and the Open University, established by protestors at UC Berkeley was raided by police, with 65 activists detained.49 The presence of police on campuses can, nevertheless, exceed far beyond such levels of violence, such as in the exceptional case of Kofi Adu-Brempong, a 35- year old doctoral student and teaching assistant at the University of Florida. Adu- Brempong, an immigrant from Ghana, lived in on-campus housing was reported as worried that his student visa may not be extended. Referred to as delusional and hysterical, the police were called when Adu-Brempong raised his voice in his home. Adu-Brempong was then tased by police forces twice, shot twice with an assault rifle, then finally shot in the face twice, leaving him in critical condition after losing his tongue and jaw. After the brutal attack, the 165 cm tall man, who needed a cane to walk due to a childhood case of polio, was arrested
43 Among others in Frankfurt, Jena, Heidelberg and Stuttgart. 44 http://wozazimbabwe.org/?p=626 45 http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/stud-j02.shtml 46 http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE6230F4 47 http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=284:six-students- were-arrested-on-hosei-university&catid=34:struggles&Itemid=53 48 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/24/uc-irvine-protest-17-arre_n_475903.html 49 http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=258:uc-berkeley- open-university-raided-by-police-65-arrested&catid=34:struggles&Itemid=53

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge with felony charges for violently resisting arrest. The five special operative police officers involved had been charged with racist violence in the past, having thrown eggs at African-American passersby, with the team leader being demoted to campus security for that reason. This context becomes exposed differently, as no significant protests had taken place in Florida until then, with the attack on Kofi Adu-Brempong taking place on March 1, 2010, three days before the nationwide protests against the privatization of education were declared to take place. In a state with a dense history of slavery and racism, it was historically common for a slave-owner to make an example of a slave to prevent any potential rebellion. However, not a local phenomenon, this panopticon model of surveillance and submission for fear of violent punishment is a global model. In Adu-Brempongs case, however, the extremity provoked a group of 400 students, locals and professors to march into the Board of Trustees office at the University of Florida, protesting and demanding justice for Kofi and an end to oppressive, violent strategies at universities. Taking Down the Fortress The examples of blockade in Europe, international uprising, transnational meetings and solidarity with Adu-Brempong show a significant realignment of protest methodology. They show a struggle that transgresses national borders, expanding to question all of the spheres of life appropriated by capitalization and privatization. Politicized by the three-month squatting of the Arena in 1976,50 as reflected in a recent interview51, the Austrian Jewish filmmaker, Ruth Beckermann, worked on a film about a workers strike at Semperit, a tire factory in an industrial
50 The squatting was aimed at establishing an alternative, self-organized cultural center in Viennas former run-down slaughterhouse and represents the culmination of the engagement of social and political movements of the 1970s in Austria. 51 http://www.hoanzl.at/film/osterreich/kurzfilme.html

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge quarter south of Vienna. Reporting on an interview with one of the workers about the trouble of the strike movement, he clarifies that companies and syndicates are controlled by the Jew. At the editing table, Beckermann decides to leave his conglomerate of classical anti-Semitic dictums out of the film, remarking: It is about the workers struggles which we want to support with this film. [] You shouldnt be over-sensitive because of an anti-Semite.52 By including demands, criticism and claims that go beyond the immediate context of education and universities, expanding to the identification of how the neoliberal capitalist market logic has infiltrated all parts of life,53 the global education protests proved to be transgressive a crucial characteristic considering the transgressive character of the opposed system. However, this must include the protest movement itself. Therefore it is essential to be vigilant about all exclusionist strategies that are reproduced within the protests. Sexism and racism were not sufficiently attacked and led to some of the affected individuals breaking away from the protests. Within the protests, it was alarming, for example, to see redundant anti-Semitic stereotypes reproduced by a group of students from Weimars Bauhaus University without being called out and contested. While traveling past international university occupations, they spread thousands of flyers of fake dollar bills, replaced with a picture of Milton Friedman and a claim criticizing Bologna on the back, identifying a Jewish economist as the root of all evil, reproducing one of the most dangerous anti-Semitic myths of the Jews and their economic dominance. As the only personified supplement for all possible claims against the commodification of knowledge, the banknote can be downloaded as a template to fill in ANY claim,54 therefore ANY claim criticizing the
52 Ruth Beckermann, Illusionen und Kompromisse. Zur Identitt der Wiener Juden nach 1945 in Eine zerstrte Kultur. Jdisches Leben und Antisemitismus in Wien seit dem 19. Jahrhundert, Botz et al, eds., dvo, Vienna 1990, p. 357. 53 See Lina Dokuzovi and Eduard Freudmann: Squatting the Crisis: On the Current Protests in Education and Perspectives on Radical Change, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna, 11/2009; http://eipcp.net/n/1260352849 54 http://m18.uni-weimar.de/protest/uploads/BildungsgutscheinA4.pdf

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge commodification of knowledge is supplemented with the Jew as the universal scapegoat. It is also remarkable that this action came from a university just 10km (approximately 6 miles) away from the Buchenwald concentration camp, censoring an art project dealing with the Shoah55 and concealing its own cruel history of anti-Semitism.56 No matter what the protestors intended, the reproduction of sexist, racist, anti-Semitic and other exclusionist elements must be critically confronted with uncompromising rejection regardless of any wrongly intended restrictive thoughts for the sake of the protests. As increasing levels of oppression are the response to resistance, protestors cannot accept a reproduction of such ideologies within their articulated demands and actions. In a fight against the commodification of education, its subservience to capital and coloniality and educations role as reproductive machinery, the link between capitalization and nationalization supranational or transnational must be observed and fought against as well as transnationality has the danger of accepting, perpetuating and reproducing the logic of the nation-state. The expansion to transnational struggle and transnational networking of protests is key, but perhaps this is the moment to envision a new vocabulary of worldwide resistance. This broader interlinkage of local implications of oppression and struggle describes what Banerjee terms translocality as [] local communities living in democratic societies that are engaged in conflicts with both the state and the market, and sometimes even with civil society, while also making connections with other resistance movements in different parts of the world, continuing with: The ultimate challenge of a theory of translocal resistance is to conceive the inconceivable: an extension of the democratic that transcends nation-state sovereignty, perhaps even transcends citizenship, because The nation-state then is a fundamental building block of globalization, in the working of
55 See Ronen Eidelman, The Neues Museum saga, http://medinatweimar.org/2008/06/15/the-neues- museum-saga/ 56 See the history section of the universitys website: http://www.uni- weimar.de/cms/index.php?id=3886&L=1

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge transnational corporations, in the setting-up of a global financial system, in the institution of policies that determine the mobility of labor, and in the creation of the multi-state institutions such as the UN, IMF, World Bank, NAFTA and WTO. [] So the translocal emerges at the intersection of political society and civil society where groups of people comprising the political society in different parts of the globe are fighting similar battles over resources against market and state actors.57 The model of the siege of the fortress Hofburg demonstrates the micro-version of a macro-model. It showed that in order to take action and create a blockade, it must be carried out on all three levels: the periphery (of the fortress blockades), the semi-periphery (siege) and the center (sabotage). The same applies to the macro-level: radical change can only be achieved when the fortress is fought on multiple layers, from all regions, inside and outside. Struggle and solidarity must not only take place within and across the centers, uniting the nations of Europe or states of the USA. The conditions of the center are both connected to and complicit in the conditions of oppression worldwide, therefore, solidarity and struggle must extend to, for example, the struggles in non-Christian nations, the manifold protests taking place throughout the Global South, and zones subjugated to erasure. The protest cannot legitimize that erasure! Such zones receive brutal sanctions against movement of people, the very movement necessary for transnational union. This is where translocality comes into play. It is an international mode of struggle which simultaneously resists the links between capital and nation-state, which does not acknowledge the privilege of those within the center, and does not reproduce the colonial ideology of salvation through education or the complex structures composing the knowledge economy. It takes the understanding ones own involvement in global processes into resistance
57 Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, Histories of Oppression and Voices of Resistance: Towards a Theory of the Translocal in Reartikulacija, no. 9, Ljubljana, 2009; http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=612

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 Dokuzovi, Freudman | Fortified Knowledge actions. This model must be considered in future summits and meetings,58 in order to expand future protests beyond the center, to establish exchange and collaboration on a translocal level with resistant forces across all regions, extending and challenging the regime of fortified knowledge. ***
Lina Dokuzovi is an artist and theorist, living and working in Vienna, Austria. Her artwork and research, predominantly as a series of diagrammatical visualizations of theory, analyze the mechanisms of appropriation, privatization and militarization of structures, such as education, culture, the body and land. She is a board member of the Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBK) and a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Eduard Freudmann researches and intervenes in the intersection between art and politics, power relations and social contexts, contemporary theirstory/ourstory and media mechanisms, strategies of exclusion and the commodification of knowledge. He lives and works in Vienna and teaches in the department for Post-Conceptual Art Practices at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

58 For upcoming transnational protest events, for example: http://www.euroalter.com/transeuropa/bologna-process/, http://www.uniriot.org/uniriotII/index.php, http://bolognaburns.org/

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 Kleindienst | Some Thoughts on Ideology 3. Sta Kleindienst EU Some Thoughts on Ideology

Originally published in Reartikulacija (Reartikulacija, Artistic-Political-Discoursive Platform, Ljubljana, 2010) Reartikulacija #10,11,12,13, www.reartikulacija.org

The process of expanding the EU to post-socialist countries, with the biggest mass expansion in 2004, can be seen as logical consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the social and political changes of the early 1990s, which introduced the neoliberal capitalist way of thinking and doing to the then-closed markets. The Western tendency to break the Iron Curtain can be put in parallel with the neoliberal project and can be seen as a way to produce new territories capable of embracing free market ideology rather than just an effort to liberate the oppressed people and bring them human rights. The neoliberal market economy also exported a post-ideological state of mind to the Eastern European countries, introducing them to the end of great ideologies and including them into one big democratic world family. And one way of keeping the ideological foundations of the EU intact is also to constantly renovate its relationship towards its own different ideological and totalitarian histories. If we take a closer look at the European Parliament Resolution on European Conscience and Totalitarianism which the EU parliament adopted on April 2, 2009, certain conclusions can be drawn from it that can show us how the representation of contemporary European ideology works by organizing a matrix of relations towards its own history (or in this case, towards the history of Eastern Europe)1 that legitimizes Europes own processes of violence and makes them natural to the functioning of the Union.
1 Although the resolution deals with all totalitarian regimes in European history, its focus is aimed on socialist regimes of Eastern Europe.

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 Kleindienst | Some Thoughts on Ideology The document promotes European values by producing a diametrical difference between the violent past, conjured by great ideologies, and the peaceful present, ready to build on the idea of harmony among all nations that constitute the European Union. In this sense, the resolution acts as an independent arbitrary mechanism that puts a dualist perspective on the EU and its past. The rhetoric of this dualist perspective is simple and it fits perfectly in the general neoliberal discourse about the post-ideological democratic political system, making it the only natural and possible option of governing. In this case, the ideologies of the past are only there to steal away the title of the big bad troublemaker, while contemporary Europe is a place of happy coexistence and by no means a place where ideology happens. This rhetoric needs a system of symbols on which the past (totalitarian) regimes can be classified as bad examples of ideology and the neoliberal present can be fully extracted out of discourse about ideologies. This system of symbols is constructed on a basis of appropriating great modern discourses about freedom and human dignity and its institutions. With this, I mean the discourse of human rights, sovereignty, the UN, the Nobel Peace Prize, etc., and also more popular events such as the Olympic Games or the recent World Cup in South Africa. What I mean is that these symbols of the free world and democracy have been appropriated so that they can serve Western capitalist ideology in making it natural and diametrical to the violent past. Their value as symbols of freedom and peace works only on the level of representation; in reality, it produces effects that are in opposition to their rhetoric. For example, we can remember the clash between reality and representation which occurred before the opening of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing when the traditional Olympic torch relay (In the context of the modern Games, the Olympic flame represents the positive values that Man has always associated with fire.2) was interrupted by protests and the runners, in white sweatsuits, had to ride in a bus to prevent the Olympic fire from being extinguished. The other example could be the sovereignty of Iraq. In his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey

2 Factsheet The Olympic Torch Relay, http://www.olympic.org/Documents/Reference_documents_Factsheets/The_Olympic_Torch_relay.pdf

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 Kleindienst | Some Thoughts on Ideology points out the way in which the Iraqi government was declared sovereign.3 On September 19, 2003, four orders were issued by Paul Bremer, the then head of the Coalition Provisional Authority; the orders included the full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits, the opening of Iraqs banks to foreign control, national treatment for foreign companies and the elimination of nearly all trade barriers. Now, these orders were in violation of the Geneva and Hague Conventions, which state that an occupying power must protect and not sell off the assets of an occupied country. Harvey states: Though Bremers rules may have been illegal when imposed by an occupying power, they would become legal if confirmed by sovereign government. The interim government, appointed by the US, that took over at the end of June 2004 was declared sovereign. But it only had the power to confirm the existing laws.4 In this example, we can clearly see how the conception of sovereignty changes from a condition of political struggle to that of an economic interest. We could say that one of the more powerful tools for the naturalization of an ideology is the control over interpretation and representation. The above- mentioned resolution does just that in producing an image of the people from Eastern (post-socialist) countries as barbaric nomads who need to be civilized and taught democracy since they bear the burden of a traumatic totalitarian past. The extract of the resolution found on the web portal of the European Parliament in the Slovene language states that new members (those who came out of a totalitarian socialist past) have to accept the guilt and have to go on a mission to achieve reconciliation through: acceptance of responsibility, an appeal for forgiveness and the encouragement of moral renovation.5 This kind of rhetoric only helps strengthen the internal division in domestic political discourse since
3 4

David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005, p. 5 Ibid.

5 European Parliament Resolution on European Consciousness and Totalitarianism http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?language=EN&type=IM- PRESS&reference=20090401IPR53245

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 Kleindienst | Some Thoughts on Ideology the majority of problems concerning, on one side, the question of socialism and revolutionary violence and, on the other side, the collaboration with German and Italian occupiers, are very present in daily political chit-chat and are only there to help score political points, but not much more than that. But on the other hand, this kind of rhetoric also produces (on the level of discourse) a certain subordination of new European countries that have no other option but to fully accept a new democratic regime which was so generously given to them by the big Western European powers. In practice, this is seen in the race to progress and to achieve a sufficient level of democracy, where Eastern European countries become suckers for all the laws, decrees and regulatives that come from Brussels and embrace them, not only without any reflection, but also with a high degree of compliance. A film by the Slovenian artist Nika Autor entitled Report on the Situation of Asylum Seekers in the Republic of Slovenia, January 2008August 2009 [Poroilo o stanju prosilcev za azil v republiki Sloveniji, januar 2008 avgust 2009] clearly shows this attitude when, on a farcical celebration of the Day of Refugees, an official representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Mr. Bojan Trnovek, is asked by the author how would he comment on the situation that the individuals who jeered at him during the speech were in fact the applicants for asylum and that it was they who didnt agree with the event, he answered: Look, about this, I must say that, in fact, in Slovenia, as such, it is taken care of in respect to international standards for asylum applicants as well as for refugees. So our law is, of course, in check with the law of the European Union. In such cases, we act according to standards that are placed in this segment in all countries of the European Union.6 While this statement clearly shows the monstrous gap between the real problematics of asylum seekers in Slovenia (which Nika Autors film is exposing) and the bureaucratic way of governing and solving things in democratic countries, it also shows how the minds of our leaders are colonized by the EU;
6 Nika Autor, Report on the Situation of Asylum Seekers in the Republic of Slovenia, January 2008 August 2009, 2010, experimental film.

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 Kleindienst | Some Thoughts on Ideology not only that they obey such regulatives completely, but that this can serve as an excuse for not doing anything to overcome real problems. But the true power of the European Parliament Resolution on European Conscience and Totalitarianism is hidden not in its content, but in the absence of content, because the resolution completely bypasses the colonial violence of the so-called old Europe. Some may argue that the resolution is focused on totalitarian regimes and that colonial violence has no place in such a document, but only its absence can produce a moral perspective which makes present a peaceful era, diametrically different from totalitarianisms of the past. Why is that? The answer lies in the discursive difference between totalitarianism (ideology) and colonialism (religion) as historical forms of governing. Both formations can be seen as a consequence of European history, with the difference being that totalitarianism functions as a political form and colonialism as an economic one. So while, on the one hand, totalitarianism represents itself as a series of symbols which derive directly from ideology and its institutions within the state, colonialism naturalizes itself through supra-national institutions such as Christianity and Humanism, that can make overseas expansion (and consequent exploitation) a universal project, a civilizing mission, the unquestionable act of exporting civilizations greatest achievements (from scientific to spiritual and governmental) to underdeveloped countries and those in need. And this is the precise point through which we can link historical colonization with contemporary forms of subjugation through capital that todays West is leading. The non-ideological framework makes colonization an economic paradigm rather than a political one, and through this, internalizes its political discourse so that no external reflection on its violent processes can be made. It is this elimination of externality that can make the imperial-colonial regime spread around the globe and work endlessly, as opposed to totalitarianism, where externality is criminalized, but can still identify totalitarianism as such. So if, on one hand, we have a clear reflection and distance (in a democratic regime of representation, of course) toward todays closed societies such as North Korea or toward radical Islamic groups, being portrayed ultrainput.com 45

 Kleindienst | Some Thoughts on Ideology as origins of terrorism, which oppose democratic values of human rights, multiculturalism, etc., it is only on the condition that the latter are represented as universal ethical values not to be judged, and not as clear political and ideological paradigms. So this optic of representation enables processes of privatization, exploitation, subjugation and even death as inherent elements to the normal functioning of democratic regimes and as necessary consequences of expansion through democratization. A clear example of this is seen in the EU intervention in todays Kosovo, where, under the guise of bringing stability to the region, institutions such as EULEX and K-FOR (NATO mission in Kosovo) are overseeing almost all local institutions and enterprises, from security, education, health care and media to businesses such as power supply, mobile telephony and construction. But even more, their intervention also serves as a platform to construct a new ideological subject in Kosovo, one that needs to be civilized and prepared to embrace a depoliticized, consumerist way of life and become an obedient part of market ideology. Agon Hamza states: The civil society of Kosovo was created from outside, it was one of the neoliberal projects. It was created based on funding programs/projects from abroad, such as multicultural tolerance, human rights, co-existence between different ethnical, cultural, and racial groups, democratization, sustainable development, etc. The so-called needs of Kosovos society are being designed (mostly) by EU bureaucrats in Brussels; they design our needs, our future, and our demands. The people of Kosovo and of the Balkans in general are portrayed as an excessively violent, criminalized society, traumatized subjects, etc.7 The reality is that, even though the intervention was supposed to be temporary, only to enable the normal functioning of the new state, the internationals (a word used to describe the official staff of the intervention) are there to stay. So
7

Agon Hamza, The Specter of Ideological Apparatuses, Reartikulacija no. 8, Ljubljana, 2009, p. 5.

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 Kleindienst | Some Thoughts on Ideology the state of Kosovo is left in a permanent state of exception, where everything is controlled by international institutions and serves only for Western interests. We could identify this as a contemporary form of colonization that works on different political, economic and social levels and uses a form of crisis as a launching point to deploy its mechanisms of control. Be it an unstable political situation such as Kosovo, an unfriendly political regime, natural or ecologic catastrophe or even an economic crisis produced from within the strongest financial centers, the neoliberal logic of expansion finds a way to rearrange political, economic and social relations in a way to introduce the logic of the free market as a necessary component of Western democratic and humanitarian intervention. We could see this in the case of the recent economic crisis, where the only solution given by the big powers was giving more financial support to multinational corporations so that they could put their production back to normal standards. In the case of Greece, the situation is even worse. Solving the financial collapse of a state by giving it financial support can do nothing in the direction of preventing the collapse from happening again and only puts a state into dependency on the generous helper in the case of Greece, the EU. So as opposed to the imposed ideological orthodoxy characteristic for totalitarian regimes, we could say that we live in an imposed capitalist orthodoxy, an heir to imperialism and colonialism, which integrates pluralism, multiculturalism, parliamentary democracy, human rights, the possibility of choice, etc., and, on the other hand, uses those same terms as ideological discursive apparatuses to naturalize processes of violence as side effects of expansion, inherent to the working of neoliberal ideology. I would like now to propose a flourish quote, written on the official web page of the EU: Europeans cherish their rich heritage of values, which includes a belief in human rights, social solidarity, free enterprise, a fair distribution of the fruits of economic growth, the right to a protected environment, respect for cultural, linguistic and religious diversity and a harmonious blend of tradition and progress,8 which
8

Europe in 12 Lessons: Lesson 1, http://europa.eu/abc/12lessons/lesson_1/index_en.htm

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 Kleindienst | Some Thoughts on Ideology clearly shows the moral standpoints on which the idea of united Europe stands, but on the other hand, we cannot go over its imperial and colonial histories, which constituted those same moral standpoints on foundations of exploitation and subjugation. Or to put it in the words of renowned Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembene, who, speaking from the other side, once said: At a moral level, I dont think we have any lesson to learn from Europe.9 ***
Sta Kleindienst is an artist living in Ljubljana.

Ousmane Sembene, Personal Quotes, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0783733/bio

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 Greif | Catatonic Harmony 4. Tatjana Greif Catatonic Harmony or Lets Blame Homos BE STUPID is the latest illuminating marketing solution of Diesel corporation. Obviously, the slogan is tuned to a specific state of mind of targeted consumers groups, presumably swallowed by a neoliberal free market, free movement of capital and non-free movement of people. Addressing the consumers as brainless crowds must be grounded in precise market analysis and thoughtful strategic planning, I suppose. A smart e-mail post was circulating a while ago displaying the money flow of Slovenian roman-catholic church. A simple calculation demonstrated how eight hundred priests easily collected at least 60 million Euros in one year only with cash collection during a mass. Millions of untaxed Euros flow first to dioceses and from there directly to Vatican. Bearing in mind that Slovenia is among the smallest European countries with a population of just two million people, this donation to Vatican is 30-times higher than Slovenias population. Vatican must be proud of such loyalty and devotion. One way of showing its pride and gratitude is to deny human rights, to discriminate human race. In April 2010, Vatican blamed gays for child sex abuse. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone claimed that homosexuality is a root cause of paedophilia, and that gays caused the church pedophilia scandals. Cardinal's outrageous comparison between pedophilia and homosexuality, presented to Urbi et Orbi by referring to unnamed specialized psychological and medical literature, is a global humiliation. Moreover, by attacking its own gay men priests Vatican declares pedophilia as something that involves only male children; what about girls, who were victims of church pedophilia? This rotten maneuver of Vatican to wash away its historic guilt is maybe transparent but certainly not naive or coincidental. Quite the opposite: why does the church maliciously replaced pedophilia with homosexuality? For the same reason ultrainput.com 49

 Greif | Catatonic Harmony they prohibited abortion and the use of condoms feudal, patriarchal violence out of the book. And by the way, the Slovenian catholic church press officer stated in his media-statement that the victims of pedophilia are negligible. The eruption of Icelandic volcano prevented the European parliament president Jerzy Buzek from a wacky meeting with the pope. President Buzek wanted to meet him in Rome in order to give him a political solance and maybe more. Strategic partnership between the EU and the holy throne? But nothing can help this derailed oligarchic freemason lounge any more; not the Opus Dei, not the papal secrecy, not the pay-offs to silence the victims, and surely not the blaming of gays. Only a few weeks earlier American NATO general John Sheehan blamed Dutch gay soldiers, who served in Bosnia for the genocide in Srebrenica. The general claimed in the United States Congress that the presence of openly gay Dutch soldiers was the cause of Srebrenica massacre in 1995. Was Vatican inspired by NATOs discovery of suitable scapegoats? It seems that gays are to be blamed for all the bad in the world. For example, gays are also guilty for the decay of heterosexual marriage and family. Members of the Lithuanian parliament seeked to ban an international lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender pride-march due to take place in Vilnius in May 2010. Inspired by the discriminatory Law on the Protection of Minors (banning minors from accessing information about non-traditional forms of family) enacted in Lithuania in March, a member of the extremist party Order and Justice Petras Graulis gathered over fifty signatures from parliamentarians under his petition addressed to the national prosecution office, and with the aim to prevent the homosexual event. I wonder how the European Parliament - according to its own resolution adopted in 2009 - is going to monitor the implementation of this law, which at the first place the parliament itself couldnt stop on time, and despite its clearly against the fundamental principles of the Union, and protection of human rights of sexual ultrainput.com 50

 Greif | Catatonic Harmony and gender minorities in Lithuania. Gays and lesbians are undermining the moral ground of public health, marriage and family also in other European countries. In Hungary not less than nine petitions were delivered to the Constitutional court by conservative actors including the Christian democratic peoples party, the Society for christian physicians, pentecostal faith church, the catholic Pro-life forum, and others. They all asked the court for opinion on the Act on Registered Partnership that entered into force in July 2009. The Court rejected the petitions declaring that the Act is in line with constitutional requirements. Recently the Italian court considered the request of three same-sex couples for the right to marry as unconstitutional. Portuguese president Anibal Cavaco Silva refused to sign the Law on same-sex marriage. The president requested from the Constitutional court to establish whether the law, which allowed civil matrimony between members of the same gender, is constitutional. An EU candidate country Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia adopted a new anti-discrimination law, which did not include sexual orientation among twenty prohibited grounds of discrimination. Before submitting the draft to the parliament, Macedonian government deleted sexual orientation. Slovenia is currently discussing a draft Family Code, which is to bring legal equality between different and same-sex marriages. There is a strong opposition from catholic church and political parties under the influence of Vatican. If this opposition manifested in painfully primitive parliamentarian hate-speech - is to some extent expectable, it is less expectable, nor understandable that the Ministry of Family drafted the bill without consulting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual associations. Also, the parliamentarian Committee for family, social affairs and disability has a peculiar understanding of civic dialogue instead of including all gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual associations, they invited only one, and several pro-life catholic ultrainput.com 51

 Greif | Catatonic Harmony family organizations. And what is the most peculiar they invited representatives of Slovenian bishops council, which is even against the principle of constitutional separation between the state and the church. Three young men, who attacked lesbian bar Caf Open in Ljubljana in June 2009, were sentenced to one and a half year of imprisonment. The verdict of the court said that the three convicted men were instigating hatred, violence and intolerance on the ground of sexual orientation. This is the first case in the history of Slovenian juridical practice that a judgment has been passed with the sentence of imprisonment for breaking the law on the ground of sexual orientation. However, they were not recognized guilty of violence and causing public danger. It seems that the throwing of burning torches into the bar full of people and beating a gay activist are not considered to be violence by the court. The lawyers of the three convicted men already filed a complaint, so the verdict is not in full power yet and all three convicted men are still walking around free. After the judgment, the neo-Nazi Patriotic youth organized a protest in front of the court building against what they called an unjust verdict. It was interesting how even some gay and lesbian activists were not able to keep a dissent political distance with regard to airplane accident of Polish president Kaczynski, who was known as one of the most sworn homophobe in Europe, but went with the flow, expressing words of admiration. While gays and lesbians all over Europe are being blamed for moral decay, destruction of holy family and marriage, for Vatican pedophilia and the tragedy in Srebrenica, for the eruption of volcano and the earthquakes, the gay and lesbian migrants and refugees are assumed guilty for stealing jobs and bright future from European citizens. Most obviously this phenomenon is reflected in the European Union asylum policy. For strengthening of territorial cohesion and keeping solid internal integration of the Union is keeping the gates closed. Today homosexual acts are still illegal in 85 countries in the world, predominantly in Muslim and African states, although also in several parts of the United States, and punishable by death in Iran, ultrainput.com 52

 Greif | Catatonic Harmony Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen. The persecution of people because of their sexual orientation and gender identity is an everyday reality. And yet we face daily deportations of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals from European countries to their states of origin where they face imprisonment, torture, death penalty or murder. Some European states shamefully demand from asylum seekers the proof of their homosexuality, others reject the right to asylum and advice them to hide their sexual orientation. Recently, Switzerland has rejected the initiative for legal definition of refugee to be widened. A motion to give legal recognition to people who are persecuted because of their sexual orientation has been rejected by the House of Representatives. European Commission failed to mention the mutual recognition of same-sex unions across EU borders in the Stockholm Programme1, a comprehensive framework for EU actions on citizenship, justice, security, asylum and immigration policies for the next five years, which ought to ensure freedom of movement for EU citizens. In March, the European Commission signed a trade deal with countries that jail and kill gays and lesbians. The revised so-called Cotonou Agreement, which delineates political and trade relations between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states, is due to be formally signed in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in June. It was first signed in 2000 in Cotonou, Benin, and revised five years ago. Out of 79 ACP states, 49 states criminalize homosexuality with up to 14 years in jail, and up to 5 punish lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people with death. Despite evident increases in state-supported violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the ACP region the Commission agreed to
1 http://www.se2009.eu/en/the_presidency/about_the_eu/justice_and_home_affairs/1.1965

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 Greif | Catatonic Harmony conclude a deal with ACP states without mentioning the human rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people. Instead, the European commissioner for Development2 Andris Piebalgs agreed to include a reference to universal human rights declaration, which explicitly dealt with discrimination solely on few grounds, such as gender, race or belief. Paradoxically, most poor countries resist the European Union - that dictates upon them its economic power and financial aid - by rejecting human rights agenda. Most manifestly these states rejected exactly gay, lesbian and transsexual rights. In their anti-gay rhetoric they dont hesitate to use the argument of catholic church connecting homosexuality and pedophilia. So, here we are back to Vatican, back to vicious circle of eternal love between politics and the clergy. Ordinary citizens should be made to believe the words of a politician, a priest and a merchant. Maybe the slogan BE STUPID is not so useless after all. ***
Tatjana Greif holds a PhD in Archaeology. She is a LGBT human rights activst, publicist and editor of book edition Vizibilija and the Journal for Critique of Science, Ljubljana.

2 http://ec.europa.eu/development

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 Tatli | Racist Core

5. efik Tatli Racist Core of EUs Structural Design De-Politicization of Colonialism and its Ideological Implications Given that political, economic and military power that resides in European Union is the power of particular states, it is hard to see the Union as a collective institutionalization of some mutual agenda that would have surpassed either the logic of the market, either the justification of that logic in accordance to Eurocentric epistemic grounds. However, since free market agenda probably sounds too general as the concept, the expansion of the Union (as the expansion of capitalism through its currently dominant model, free market neoliberalism), seemed to have reflected a wider agenda in relation to institutional and epistemological mechanisms that managed to expand the territories for exploitation as well as to justify its social, political and economic effects. The nature of these mechanisms therefore pointed to the contemporary forms of neo-colonial strategy that managed to convert or represent a dictate as a democratic mechanism that would allow the new hierarchies of exploitation to be established under the guise of establishment of universal, modernist and human progression. The Demise of the Political State The expansion of the EU in the last 30 years or so was clearly marked with the simultaneous expansion of a single, or mostly single model of political and economic rule, capitalist free market democracy. The same model did not, as it was generally conceived, mark the end of the nation-state, although it had profoundly influenced the way the relation among the state and supranational capital began to realize. As Subharatta Bobby Banerjee noticed, Rather than marking the death of the nation-state as some theorists of globalization like to argue, the global economy ultrainput.com 55

 Tatli | Racist Core is premised precisely on a system of nation-states. Neoliberal globalization can be seen as a marker for the final hegemonic triumph of the state mode of production. The nation-state then is a fundamental building block of globalization, in the working of transnational corporations, in the setting-up of a global financial system, in the institution of policies that determine the mobility of labor, and in the creation of the multi-state institutions such as the UN, IMF, World Bank, NAFTA and WTO.1 It seems that dichotomy, or alleged dichotomy among supranational and national state realized in the formula that, by resortibg to power nation-states acquired through colonialism, managed to sustain the control of the same states over the flow of now international spread of capital. As Banerjee noticed, Old patterns of imperialism can be seen in the dominance of neoliberal policies in todays global political economy. Transnational corporations often wield power over Third World countries through their enticements of foreign investment and their threats to withhold or relocate their investments. In return for foreign investments and jobs, corporations are able to extract from impoverished and often corrupt Third World governments tax concessions, energy and water subsidies, minimal environmental legislation, minerals and natural resources, a compliant labor force and the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZ) which are essentially states of exception where the law is suspended in order for the business of economic extraction to continue.2 The state of exception means not only that procedures that allowed an exception to the constitutional dimension of the law to be exercised, but it also means that the expansion of the capital (along with the expansion of the Eu) had to be contextualized as something more then mere corporate agenda.

1 Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, Histories of Opression and Voices of Resistence: towards a Theory of the Translocal, http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=612

2 Ibid.

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 Tatli | Racist Core In case of Eastern Europe for instance, a buzz word Euro-Atlantic integrations, in this sense presented a cluster of meanings in relation to the expansion of capital, but it also functions, or is interpreted as some uncanny guarantee that the freedoms are equaled to freedom as material integration into the free market through conditions set by debt economy and freedom of joining the modernism as defined by Euro-Atlantic axis of power. In a way, the super narrative of this procedure was found in the most generally comprehended notion of democracy, which was converted into a perverse redundancy platform that would utilize populist sentiment as an instrument that would create an aureole of legitimacy that allowed to populist and bourgeois elites of newly colonized countries to represent their own subjugation as progress toward further integrations as well as re-confirm the control populist and bourgeois elites in colonizing countries to retain their monopoly on definition of progress. Banerjee stated, Imperial formations in the contemporary political economy are more efficient in the sense that formal colonies no longer need to be governed. Imperialism has learned to manage things better by using the elites of the former colonies to do the governing, and the structural power of supranational institutions like the World Trade Organization, World Bank and International Monetary Fund and markets to do much of the imperial work.3 Clearly, the lack of need for governing from outside pointed to the auto- colonialism as the epistemic and institutional procedure in which complicity to ones own subjugation meant that the political imaginary and interpretation of the function of the state was also subjected to this servile sentiment. Achille Mbembe noticed that Unlike certain Western experiences , the extension of the role of the state was thus not automatically achieved through the disruption of old social ties. In a number of cases, state domination or the etatisation of society was achieved through old hierarchies and old patronage networks. Two consequences of this process merit mention. On the one hand, it
3

Ibid. 57

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 Tatli | Racist Core paved the way, more then occured in other parts of the world, to an unprecedented privatization of public prerogatives. On the other, it not only allowed a degree of socialization of state power generally poorly understood by analysts , but also the correlative socialization of arbitrariness...4 Mbembe though of postcolonial African states, but the principles behind these procedures might be clearly seen in the context of their specific application in the expansion of the EU (in Europe). Hence, auto-colonial rule in the number of Eastern and Southeastern European states, whether public institutions were nominally privatized or not, was marked by the infiltration of the state institutions exactly by (in most of the cases reactionary) partonage networks (functioning as ethnic, nepotist or merely criminal agents) who progressively degraded the prerogatives of the state to that level on which privatization (of public property) was represented as salvation (by capital) and, perversly enough, as the fight against the old corrupted patronage networks whose current influence is more perversely ascribed to ex socialist regime. Mbembe's socialization of arbitrariness in both western and otherwise Europe, had not therefore led to the socialization of the state in the sense that would evoke emergence of the social state but, exactly on the opposite, it lead to the subjugation of the state to the populist majority that found a resolution to its own class predicament (created by capital) in racial cleansing of the labor market all motivated by old-fashion Eurocentric racist matrix that became the epistemic subtext of the European ontological unity. For instance, Kaczynski brothers rule in Poland opened the state for free market while simuoltaneoulsy segregated sexual minorities, Sarkozy's neo-Vichy racist government in similar fashion engaged it self to liberalize the state prerogatives while it deported Roma communities and segregated religious minorities of Muslim origin as the means of sustainment of populist diversion from political issues, Berlusconi's rule installed patronage as the precondition of assendence within the hierarchy of the state, Hungary's right-turn almost institutionlized
pg. 32
4 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (University of California Press, Berkley Los Angeles London, 2001.)

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 Tatli | Racist Core anti-semitic and anti-Roma stance as normative, not to mention various racist immigration policies propriatory to the EU as a whole. Of course, at the same time, EU aspirants such as Croatia or Serbia, whose post-socialist democratization led to rehabilitation of populist state, ultimately fascism, began to perceive Europe or the West in general as a symbolical contingency and institutional embodiment of dogmatic reactionary values, completely neglecting, slandering and denying the history of (European) revolutionary struggles. The procedures underlying the narrative of integration into the EU resulted therefore in socialization of the state, a procedure that legitimized arbitrariness in formating of the state as pacifier of patronage and privatization of the public prerogatives, reforming at the same time the hierarchies of rule as those hierarchies that would elevate various populists into the position of power. This was done in order that exploitation and/or auto-exploitation could be justified through simultaneous deprivation of the state as public agent and promotion of such socialization as an alleged answer to impotent political state. Socialization of the state therefore meant that the state institutions, as well as great majority of non-government institutions of civil sector started to play a role in creation of new exploitation hierarchies. The civil society in colonial peripheries or semi-peripheries therefore became a sector of social reflection that tends to dislocate the origin of various social predicaments into the field of mere dysfunctions of market democracies. This dislocation of the origin of effect of capital by the civil sector means that the origin of social predicaments was interpreted as if it was deprived of its ideological and political background. However, this dislocating tendency should not be read as a guise of an ideology, but it should be read as de-ideological procedure that is, by stripping of a political context of the predicament, actually contribute to the commodification of the bodies of the subjectivities. Hence, being a dislocating procedure of the class struggle from political to a context of social, health and biological protection. It is noticeable that in the European public discourse, the EU (as a political conglomerate) is increasingly being referred to as the community of its people,

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 Tatli | Racist Core not political subjects, which implied that citizen subjectivities are increasingly being perceived by institutions as biological, not political contingencies. In the context of demise of the political state, this is important because the imposition of the biological pretext to the interpretation of the function of the state lead to formation (or political perception) of a community as biological, ethnic community, while the free market economy got out to be mere international dimension of such a state. This disposition should be seen as differentially employed because it is clear that the oppressive apparatus (of the state) in Europe is in internal affairs being deployed against non-European biological entities, while in foreign affairs it is being used for colonial resource extraction under the guise of help to those who are already discriminated in Europe. Hence, biopolitics, as model of control through de-politicization of class struggle could be seen as reserved for internal agendas, while necropolitics as politicization of biopolitics (Grini) is being deployed in foreign affairs and colonial extraction operations. In this context, this biopolitical - necropolitical relation ultimately produced proper European union as the rudimentary, biological, white (Christian) conglomerate of interests, not socially, culturally or politically distinctive community capable of politically reflecting its predicament. As Banerjee stated, Thus, rather than marking the death of the nation state, globalization as capitalist imperialism is dependent on a system of multiple states which required a new doctrine of extra-economic, and especially military, coercion (Wood, 2003: 151). The ability to deploy extra-economic coercive power is analogous to Operation Infinite War, a Hobbesian state of war which to quote Hobbes consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary.5 So, it could be said that the role of the state in European Union has become the role of production of extra-economic measures that would justify measures against the others who were designated as those subjectivities who should serve as a focal point of diversion of the dissent away from capital and-or its colonial
Translocal, http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=612
5 Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, Histories of Opression and Voices of Resistence: towards a Theory of the

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 Tatli | Racist Core nature. It this sense, the role of the state in the EU seems to have become the role of administration of new geo-racial demarcation lines within the EU and administration and production of peripheries outside fortress Europe. Additionaly, socialization of the state should be seen as a procedure that deprives the political rule (as central part of political mechanism) of its ability to produce society, which consequently means that the production of society was delegated to the regime of circulation of capital. Thus, it would be false to say that EU failed in an attempt to construct the state that would surpass market or racist logic it actually produced its state as a pacifier of class dissent, incubator of reactionary response to the effect of capital and as an political impetus only in regard to the expansion of capitalist, ultimately neocolonial interests. Also, this does not mean that the European democratic discourse (in general) failed, it means that the European democratic discourse (at least in a big measure) became a part of the apparatus that managed to combine capitalist calculus and the Eurocentric fascism and to situate it as the core of allegedly universal modernist progress defined by that same apparatus. Between Zero and Infinity Walter Mignolo noticed that, There is no modernity without coloniality; coloniality is constitutive of modernity. Modernity is not a historical period, but it is a rhetoric grounded on the idea of salvation by the agents telling the story and placing themselves at the last moment of a global historical development and carrying the flag and the torch toward the bright future of humanity. The rhetoric of modernity has been, since its inception, the rhetoric of salvation: by conversion (Spanish and Portuguese mendicant orders), by civilizing missions (British and French agents); by development and modernization (US experts in economy and politics guiding the Third World towards the same standards as the First); and salvation through market democracy and consumerism.6
6 Walter Mignolo, De-Linking Epistemology from capital and Pluri-Versality A conversation with Walter

Mignolo by Marina Grini, part 1, http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=196

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 Tatli | Racist Core In accordance to this, it could be said the concept of salvation could also be deemed as canonized aggression that produced the contemporary colonial epistemological discourse that had not just ascribed the license of interpretation of modernity to Eurocentric agents, but had also imposed a monopoly over the definition of civilization to those who are bringing the salvation through currently dominant model of colonial capitalism, neoliberalism. Hence, Mignolo saw neoliberal capitalism as current historical model of colonial matrix of power he described, In four interrelated domains in which the struggle for control, accommodation, resistance, re-existence, etc. takes place: the control of economy (labor, land, natural resources); the control of authority (government, army); the control of gender and sexuality (control of family life and reproduction of the species based on the Christian/bourgeois family) and the control of knowledge and subjectivity (epistemology, aesthesis). 7 Regarding the economic control, it is clear that integration into the European project subsumed (more precisely required) the adoption of market democracy (with all of its constituent and ideological parts) as dominant model of rule, which as such was proclaimed to be a necessary pretext to the adoption of so- called European values. Hence, the control of economy was delegated to market agents and local neoliberal elites, which was an operation that was interlaced with the control of government and the army, that is, with the issues ultimately in regard to the nature of sovereignty. This, fractioned sovereignty as Mbembe called it, relied to the notion of, as he stated The tutelary government exercised by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and private and public lenders was no longer limited to imposing respect for broad principles and macro-economic balances. In practice, the tutelage of international creditors was considerably strenghtened and now involves a range of direct interventions in domestic economic management...8 Of
7 Ibid. 8 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (University of California Press, Berkley Los Angeles London, 2001.), pg. 74.

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 Tatli | Racist Core course, this notion relies primarily and is most agressively applied in the non- European colonies. Since it is obvious that the supranational-national state dichotomy in capital is the fake one, what happened to the state that fosters fractioned sovereignty is that it was formatted (from outside and by its elites) as an impotent set of institutions whose function became potent mostly in production of conditions for legitimization of the racial subtext of salvation through neoliberalism. The role of the state, in this sense, became the role of disruption of its own coercive aspect that would have tackled social inconsistencies without relying exclusively to the market logic. Mbembe stated, The shift to market economy required the suspension of individuals role in politics and as citizens that is, the emasculation of the interplay of rights and claims enabling people to have not only duties and obligations toward the state, but also rights against it. 9 The notion of rights in market economy, however, is not in relation to dissent that would have addressed the state for the lack of protection of rights as citizens prerogatives, but is in relation to de-mobilization of the state in favor of sustainment of a spectrum of organizations and/or agencies that would substitute the state in protection of rights deemed not as citizens, but consumer rights, which as them selves are increasingly receiving the status of (luxurious) commodities, not citizens prerogatives. As Mbembe continued By doing everything possible to dismantle state intervention in the economy (such as controls, subsidies, protection), without making the state more efficient and without giving it new, positive functions, the result has been that the states (already very fragile) material base has been undermined, the logics underlying the building of coalitions and clienteles have been upset (without being positively restructured), its capacities for reproduction have been reduced, and the way has been open for it to wither away.10
9

Ibid. 63

10 Ibid, pg 75.

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 Tatli | Racist Core This is not a question whether some inconsistency was an incident or had a normative property, this is a question of how an interchange between normative and incidental attributes of some social predicament has been equaled, normalized as parts of reproduction of capital that ultimately received a form of distortion of the link between the power and its effect where this distorted relation was eventually institutionalized as the order. This means that the distinctive marks of certain predicament, positive or otherwise were pushed into indifferent, schizophrenic interpretative context that completely distorted the notion of purpose or quality of some content. Alain Badiou stated that The qualitative something is, itself, discernible insofar as it has its other in itself. The quantitative something is on the other hand, without other, and consequently its determinateness is indifferent. Lets understand this as stating that the quantitative One is the being of the pure One, which does not differ from anything. It is not that it is indiscernible: it is discernible amidst everything, by being the indiscernible of the One. What founds quantity, what discerns it, is literally the indifference of difference, the anonymous One.11 So, if the Anonymous One is seen as a content that stands in the core of the indifferent normative, such a normative had not only de-politicized the interpretation of origins of social predicaments, but it also pacified the resolution to those predicament by locating the interpretation of any predicament within the institutional and epistemic limits provided by the regime - consequently implying that there is a consensus among all social protagonists on the adequacy of the regime as well as on the resolution to the regimes inconsistencies. For instance, verbalization of global financial crisis as our crisis shows that collectivization of the guilt serves as mere part of the reproduction of the Anonymous One of capital. Of course, this procedure pointed to the general disqualification of the prerogatives of, not just the state, but of political power in general. In that sense,
11 Alain Badiou, Being and Event (Continuum Books, London New York, 2005.) p 167.

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 Tatli | Racist Core it means that the key prerogative of political power the production of society has been exchanged for non-specific indulgence to the wishes of the demos that were in the first place produced by capital, not political ideology. However, disqualification of the prerogatives of political power does not function as the reduction, prohibition or as a dictate, but as the instrument that actually freed the democratic subjugates to resent only as long as their resentment reflected their desires for transgression of the limits to consumption, not the transgression of the values sustained by capitalist democratic regime. Mbembe stated, paraphrasing, state sovereignty as a colony combined weakness of, and inflation of, the notion of right: weakness of right in that, in the relation of power and authority, the colonial model was, in both theory and practice, the exact opposite of the liberal model of debate and discussion; inflation of right in that, except when deployed in the form of arbitrariness and the right of conquest, the very concept of right often stood revealed as a void. For instance, a great deal of discussions (in the European public discourse) that accompanied occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan in majority of cases (critically) regarded only small aspects of the methodology of conduct of those wars, not their colonial nature. Hence, in such a way, inflation of the notion of right dislocated the political calculus into the context of non-specific reasoning, articulations and representations related only to the phantom-like significance of procurement of democracy and the free market. In other words, as an exchange for rejection of the notion of right in political discourse, a void (as a break in connection of power and its effect) was produced and filled with a myriad of non-specific agendas of human right protection, liberty etc., in no connection to the political power that defined those terms and imposed it self as a master who classifies those worthy of receiving human rights, liberties and so on. The emphasis here is on the procedure of filling of the void, which repetitive property on one side manages to represent constant de-ideologized, apolitical rhetoric of human rights as actual procurement of rights for all, while on the other side it serves as a mask of racial classfication of those worthy of having any rights at all. For instance, former French foreign minister Michle Alliot- ultrainput.com 65

 Tatli | Racist Core Marie recently paid a visit to Gaza, to ask for the release of a single Israeli soldier held by Hamas in spite of thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.12 Lets not forget that European support of Israel was possible only after Jews (those integrated and otherwise) were biologically exterminated in Europe. Advocacy of rights of Jews (and/or Israel) by the representative of EU13, which as a state, simultaneously tolerates increasing number of anti-semitic regime's back in Europe, is not paradoxicall, but exactly reflects Eurocentric racist ability to sustain heterogenic property of a racist scale (favoring Israel slightly more then Arabs, but in principle loathing them both), as long as it does not tackle them selves as self-proclaimed masters. In a similar fashion, EUs tolerance of Serbian and (in slighter measure) Croatian aggression and genocide of the Bosnian Muslims in the nineties was clearly influenced by racial classifications that formatted EUs stance toward the situation. That stance basically provided rhetorical support to the victims while the genocide was going on, only to be exchanged for political condemnation of the victims resistance to genocide under the guise of condemnation of radicalization of the victims along the religious Islamic fundamentalist lines. The message of the EU to the victims was that they should have die happy knowing that the EU supported them. Any how, this bluntly fascist classifications of those worthy and non-worthy of having rights actually pointed to the logic that structured the imaginary of the proper European subjectivity - who, by discarding the ideological prefix and the need of political articulation of any rights, actually, in accordance to the market logic, deemed the notion of rights only in a binary mode. This is a mode that deems the application of rights in the First world as those rights that guarantee to the proper subjectivity he/she can and should become an apolitical commodity, while the application of the same rights in the Third world means that somebody classified as non-commodifiable could and should (try to) become almost commodifiable thing.
12 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/21/michele-alliotmarie-frenc_n_812156.html 13 One of the first reactions of Germans chancellor Merkel to the demise of Mubarak in Egypt was expressed through her hope that Egypt would respect the peace treaty with Israel. http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=207865

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 Tatli | Racist Core This logic comprised a subtext to otherwise empty experience of life in market democracy (in the First world), whose political realization got out to be nothing else but a redundant (extra-economic) pattern of self-realization as a commodity to whom a dimension of significance is being ascribed on the basis of racial classification. The ascription of purpose to experience of being a commodity through racism is therefore an epistemic operation, which by constant reinvention of forms of subjugation and repetition of ascribing of such values, manages to emulate social dynamics in general. The repetition of this operation (colloquially experienced as the lack of radical changes) on one side negates political experience of the world, or the world it self, and on the other provides an abundance of events that saturate everyday experience, but does not confirm the heterogeneity of the world and possibility of politics, but only confirms homogenization of the world under the rule of modernist or postmodernist meaning defined by colonial capitalism. As Marina Grini noted, Postmodernism abolishes the distance and situates man inside the world that is made of signs and ahistorical languages. The global era oscillates this distance between zero and infinity. That is why there is the feeling of the absence of the world and at the same time we witness its over abundance.14 Regarding the notion of infinity, it would be productive to resort to what Badiou noted on that notion when he said that, The contraction in virtuality of repetition in the presence of that which repeats itself; a contraction named infinity on the basis of the void in which the repetition exhausts itself.15 So, in this context, if the void where the repetition exhausts it self is the place where the link between the colonial power (exploitation) and its effect
14 Marina Grini, Capital,Repetition, http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=695
15 Badiou distinguishes two kinds of infinities, good and bad. The bad infinity relates to the objective process, transcendence (having-to-be) representation. The good infinity relates to subjective virtuality, immancence, unpresentable - Alain Badiou, Being and Event (Continuum Books, New York, 2005.) p 166- 167.

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 Tatli | Racist Core (subjugation) is being achieved and visible, then what the regime dislocates or subverts is exactly the infinite property of a link between the power and its effect. In regard to Grinis thesis, what is infinite is the abundance of social realizations based on subjugation, exploitation and purpose found in racism, while the zero is the value ascribed to the political interpretation of infinity of that exploitation. Hence, as for Mignolos dimensions of control, the control of gender and sexuality pointed to the aspect of the colonial epistemology in regard to the specific notion of conversions from Christian to liberal heterosexual normative. Paraphrasing Mignolo, through the invention of the concept of woman, Christian, and later liberal heterosexual normativity implied envisioning a world in which gender distinction and sexual preferences are determined by a moral code dictated by the truth of a transcendental behavior or by the needs of the market. Of course, secularization of patriarchal control of gender and sexuality, implied that secularization of subjectivities is being done as their conversion into the commodity. Additionally, this procedure provided an apolitical basis of differentiation various political subjects of different political inclinations might use as emulation of politics. Antagonisation of the abortion issues, control over the body etc., if deprived of their political and ideological origins therefore provided a convinient, fancy antagonistic tool that allowed to complict political subjects in the West to emulate political adversity in front of the public, while being in consensus on fundamental ideological issues that created those problems in the first place. On the other hand, utilization of the issues of gender and sexuality could be seen as politically deployed only (or in majority of cases) when a need arose to slander certain splinter regime. The salvation of the women in Afghanistan used as a pretext to (post 9/11) invasion did nothing for women rights after the invasion. On the other hand, increased number of emerging Iranian free thinking (female authors) published and endorsed in the West that coincided

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 Tatli | Racist Core with rising tensions around Iranian nuclear program all pointed out to specific utilization of human rights agenda for particular colonial goals. Otherwise, Eurocentric hypocrisy regarding these questions showed it self through public and institutional discourses, which have endorsed various queer or LGBTQ activities (rights) only when they proven them selves as politically aseptic cultural events. Consequently, this has produced specific public sensitivity for such hypocrisy, which consequently provided contemporary European fascist democracies with a liberal angle - as it was in the case of France (speaking of hypocrisy, a country that pathetically deems it self as Home of Human Rights) which had deported whole Roma communities in straight neo-Nazi fashion, while being proud for having a gay mayor of Paris. The Telos of a Fascist Democracy According to Mignolo, Since the sixteenth century and the modern/colonial foundation of racism, certain regions of the world, and people dwelling within it, were classified as lesser. Who was in the position to classify? Not Black Africans, American-Indians or Arabic Muslims. No, they were classified, but had no say in the classification. The classification, and success, was invented and implemented by Western Christian theologians, and later on, by secular philosophers and scientists. Thus, knowledge was cast as uni-versal, although it was created and enacted in one region (Western Christianity) and by a particular community of bodies (White Males publicly assuming the rightfulness of heterosexuality).16 Since the issue of secularization enjoys a status of universal affirmative value in the EU, it is extremely important to tackle that issue and its connotations in regard to the exact opposite of what it should have been in a political society. Hence, if comprehended as a pretense to the rule of civil society in Europe, secularization in the context of contemporary colonialism does not serve as a political instrument that would politicize social antagonisms by discarding of
Mignolo by Marina Grini, part 1, http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=196
16 Walter Mignolo, De-Linking Epistemology from capital and Pluri-Versality A conversation with Walter

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 Tatli | Racist Core apolitical values, but it functions as typical colonial instrument that discards political and ideological angle of the social predicament in favor of the market, as well as it functions as perverse epistemic instrument which allows to the clerical or generally non-secular structures to emulate their opposition to big capital which they profoundly support and rationalize. Since (such) secularization in the EU presumes commodification, what better way to rationalize the effect of capital (slavery, class division, commodification etc.) there is but to divinize the contemporary slavery. As a result, it is obvious that the influence old (patriarchal) social ties execute on subjective logic of emancipation (that should allegedly be posited between Christian roots of Europe and consumerist roots in the malls) is being used as a tool that should mask, or reinterpret very real influence Vatican and western Christian theology in general have on the conduct of (both internal and foreign) policy. The fact that Vatican (and its chief, ex-Hitler Jugend member, the Pope) is allowed to determine who is and who is not eligible for joining the Union (as in case of Turkey which is being rejected by EU on racist grounds) and/or to determine what kind of roots (allegedly) secular EU has is nothing less then ludicrous. For instance, there was a recent decision brought by the European Court of Human Rights that legitimized the crucifix in Italian public schools, stating (in the courts decision) that The Court found that, while the crucifix was above all a religious symbol, there was no evidence before the Court that the display of such a symbol on classroom walls might have an influence on pupils.17 How can one have proof that some symbolical contingency has made tangible influence? Of course that crucifix as an object of wood and metal does not make any influence what so ever, but it is unbelievable the Human Rights Court is bluntly neglecting a simple fact that the symbol as it self is an influence. Its symbolical
externalbydocnumber&table=F69A27FD8FB86142BF01C1166DEA398649, March 2011.
17http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkp197/view.asp?action=open&documentId=883171&portal=hbkm&source=

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 Tatli | Racist Core disposition in the public school therefore clearly implies that Christianity should be seen as the core of western civilization as well as it represents typical colonial style cynicism in regard to that. Hence, it was also stated by the Court that There was nothing to suggest that the authorities were intolerant of pupils who believed in other religions, were non-believers or who held non-religious philosophical convictions.18 But, it is only the crucifix that hangs in the classroom, as there should be no religious symbols in a secular country at all or there should be all of them. So, according to this insane logic, pictures of Hitler or pictures of Nazis as well could be posited in the classrooms Europewide because there is no evidence that those pictures as such killed anyone and because there is no evidence that the pictures of Nazis commited genocide, only if they had tiny death rays or gas conteiners hidden in the canvas which contained special gas able to differentiate genetic propeties of Arian and non-Arian pupils... Of course, the popular fundamentalist buzz-word, Christian roots of Europe seems to have been adopted as a core value that should make rational brutal inconsistencies various EU countries adopt as their policy, while serving as an ontological platform able to simultaneously depoliticize society as politically adversarial potential and to amplify it as an ethnic-community (Volkgemeinschaft) that should (after multiculturalism has so conveniantly failed) continue to be a constitutive basis of a state whose hierarchies of emancipation and forms of pluralism would be based on racist logic. According to Achille Mbembe, To be sure, the postcolony is chaotically pluralistic; it has nonetheless an internal coherence. It is a specific system of signs, a particular way of fabricating simulacra or re-forming stereotypes. It is not, however, just an economy of signs in which power is mirrored and imagined self-reflectively. The postcolony is characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion, as well as by distinctive ways identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into
18 Ibid.

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 Tatli | Racist Core circulation19 Although Mbembe was referring to actual Third worlds postcolony, his notes very well apply to the specific way societies of colonizers are being formatted. None the less, Mbembes notion of power imagined self-reflectively in the context of the contemporary nomos of Europe could be seen as a relation which had allowed to the demos to deem its own predicament in relation to the market, not as a method of regime's control over him/her, but as a possibillity of that subjectivity to realize his/her identity through distinctive, multiple ways provided by the same regime. The power imagined self-reflectively therefore means that the political power is being imagined by proper European democrat only in terms that would determine how power would react to specific wishes and desires in relation to that subjectivities thrive to improve distinctivness of its identity. Bluntly said, proper Eurocentric subjectivity does not have a problem with the exploitaton when it exploits the other, or even him/her as long as it situates him/her higher in accordance to the racist matrix then Muslims, non-Christians, blacks, Latinos , and of course, the eternal Jew who is tolerated only if (politically) dwelling outside Europe. Consequently, political power is, by proper European democratic subjectivity, imagined as the power that allowed the concept of rights to be contextualized as non-separable from axiomatic values determined by biological, ultimately barbaric perception of the state that de-politicizes struggle for power in favor of struggle for positioning within the hierarchy of (economic, political and racial) oppression. Mbembe noticed how in postcolony, paraphrasing, state power creates, through administrative and bureaucratic practices, its own world of meanings a master code that, while becoming the societies central code, ends by governing, perhaps pardoxically the logics that underlie all other meanings within that society.
2001.), pg. 102
19 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (University of California Press, Berkley Los Angeles London,

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 Tatli | Racist Core But, since the state power in Europe, as a colonizer, does not represent the enforcement of a particular political agenda, but it represents the enforcement of neoliberal racist administration, a master code actually represents the whole system of meanings about such a state in the role of extra-economic simulation of ideology and politics. Otherwise, what posits European Union in its role of racist colonial agent is its own epistemic monopoly on definition of it self as the one that can not be judged. As Walter Mignolo stated by referring to Santiago Castro-Gmez who saw colonial epistemology as the hubris of the zero-point: the knowledge of the observer who cannot be observed. Hence, according to Mbembe The signs, vocabulary, and narratives that the commandement produces are meant not merely to be symbols; they are officially invested with a surplus of meanings that are not negotiable and that one is officially forbidden to depart from or challenge. 20 Aside other things, what is officially forbidden to challenge or depart from in the EU (or in First world in general) is not only the complicity of its moral majority to the colonial epistemology, but it is its specific notion of dissent, a sub- narrative of complicity, which is utilized in the political imaginary as a fail safe heuristic device that would, through its repetition (of constant trail and constant error), succeed only in addressing of and exchange of specific executioners of power, not the epistemic, material and ideological basis of that power. Thus preventing the unmasking of constitutive inconsistencies standing behind the regime under the guise of constant changes within that regime. Additionally, a notion of democratic dissent (not the dissent in general terms of course) could be seen as unchallengeable concept because it provided a surplus of meaning to otherwise banal political experience of the regime an experience compensated only by the sustainment of racial hierarchies and biological classifications in production of, nothing less but the human condition defined through free market economy and racism.
20 Ibid. pg 103.

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 Tatli | Racist Core In that sense, the problem with the European left (in general), or more general resentment in Europe (that allies it self with the neo-fascists and fundamentalist Christian dogmas) does not lie in its complete failure to recognize the social and political effect of capital, the problem lies in its interpretation of that effect as separate from the monopoly over the definition of the universal truth hijacked by contemporary Western capitalist democracies. Consequently, if the logic of resentment is in accordance to the logic of colonial matrix of power, it then corresponds only to a self-sufficient, self-indulgent sentiment of merely being an anti-establishment of that kind that addresses only the temporal position of executive power, not the system as a whole. Consequently, what influenced this self-sufficient sentiment is the notion of being in the final stage of history where allegedly no radical political moves are needed no more. The consequent banishment of political ideology resulted in that kind of democratic telos, which is based on distortion of the adversarial link between the basic binary in the cosmology of power the dominator and the dominated. Therefore, contemporary European colonial epistemology could be seen as mere proto-ideological discourse or ideological excurse that exchanges political basis of differentiation in favor of racist basis of differentiation. As Achille Mbembe noticed, That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all, more so than class-thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general, Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately linked to the politics of death.21
Durham, 2003,, pg. 17
21Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Libby Meintjes, in: Public Culture 15, no. 1, Duke University Press,

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 Tatli | Racist Core Shattering experience of otherness European Union experiences represents therefore a shattering experience of non-existence of (political kind of) ideology that would have surpassed utter vulgarity of infinite consumption and the consequential eradication of the political state in favor of installment of racist and/or market dogmas to serve as further compensation or addendum to the hollowness of consumerist vulgarity and political idiotism. So, it could be said that the function of political power in the First world of capital in general ruptured exactly along the lines where particular democratic dissent in no regard to struggle for rule (as struggle for political ideology) became elevated (by complicit demos and the regime) to a level of utmost political significance. And, in parallel to the proper democratic telos (based on worship of the distortion between the domination and subjugation) the exercise, representation and divinization of European values could be seen as an art of pimping up of the oppressive regime in exchange for the gifts regime provides by sustainment and embellishment of the role of those who foster European value on the racist or market scale. The only coherent experience this logic provides is the experience of repetition of discriminatory worldview in subjective sense and in an experience of a debt to the system that produced such a basis of differentiation in collective sense. As Mbembe stated, Postcolonial relationship is not primarily a relationship of resistance or of collaboration but can best be characterized as convivial, a relationship fraught by the fact of the commandement and its subjects having to share the same living space. This logic has resulted in the mutual zombification of both the dominant and those apparently dominated. This zombification means that each has robbed the other of vitality and left both impotent (impouvoir).22 This notion requires an additional angle of approach. Alain Badiou noted that, The quantitative one, the indifferent One, which is number, is also multiple- ones, because its in-difference is also that of proliferating the same-as-self
22 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (University of California Press, Berkley Los Angeles London,

2001.), pg. 104

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 Tatli | Racist Core outside of self: the One, whose limit is immediately non-limit, realizes it self in the multiplicity external to self, which has as its principle or unity the indifferent One.23 In other words, non-limitation of contemporary European nomos (represented as non-specific democratic liberty) is actually non-limitation of consumption and non-limitation in sustainment of racial basis of differentiation, while it is an utmost limitation to intepretation of the nature of certain discernability that concerned the lack of political production of society. This is a lack compensated by quantification and hybridisation of apolitical, indifferent articulations in general. It might be said that the sensibility of proper democratic subjectivity in Europe could be verbalized as if it belongs to impossibility, where this impossibility subsumes political impossibility, but also could represent an intensification of the possibility of dogmatic interpretations to be infinitely reconfirmed as being a part, or a variable, of the notion of purpose which is objectively impossible to validate. The only validity assigned to this cognitive operation is the one that have resolved the ambiguity about the functions of political power by erasure of political bases of differentiation at all. Hence, by production of social relationship that is either immersed into a financial slavery divinized by the culture deprived of the political (and adversarial) reflections of the order. Mbembe's zombification in this sense shed a light on the nature of procedure of socialization of capital (or its collectivization) which had already reached that level of realization in which the function of power and the method of its legitimization got mixed to such a degree where it became impossible to differentiate proper democratic demos apart from the effect of capital or its violent colonial expansions therefore forming a pure biopolitical/necropolitical bond. The whole transaction of values between the constituency and the position of power within European market democracies as well as between that power and
23 Alain Badiou, Being and Event (Continuum Books, London - New York, 2005.) p 166-167

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 Tatli | Racist Core its geo-racial inner and outer peripheries (zones) was therefore realized as the necropolitical relation that compensates for its inconsistencies by colonial murder and by the imposition of death as the core of salvation by democracy and the free market. Radical class divisions, expropriation, segregation are therefore deemed as progress by a colonial-racist interpretative matrix that managed to impose it self to the populous in the countries of colonizers (as method of control) and to those colonized (as a method of dying or slavery, that is necropolitics) through political de-ideologization of the social reality generally only to produce deeper, allegedly apolitical inconsistencies perversely ascribed to inadequate functions of that very colonial matrix. So, the credibility of the European Union as a whole, in matters of political art of rule, social adequacy of economic models and production of society and especially in the matters of social equality, freedom and fostering of civilized values should be deemed as equal to zero as well as it should be deemed as a mere contemporary upgrade of colonial system of rule. ***
efik eki Tatli is a theoretician from Bosnia Herzegovina. He is enrolled in PhD program at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Zagreb, Croatia.

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime

6. Ivana Marjanovi The Racist Regime of the (White) EU Schengen Border Regime
This text was originally published in Volume 3, Dossier 2: On Europe, Education, Global Capitalism and Ideology, Center for Global Studies and Humanities, Duke University, Marina Grini (ed.), 2010. http://trinity.duke.edu/globalstudies/volume-3-dossier-2-on-europe-education-global-capitalism-and- ideology-2, retreived January 15, 2011.

European Apartheid and Exception to Neoliberalism This text is a critical analysis of the processes that have been unfolding in Europe since 1989 processes related to European integration and the creation of the European Union citizenship, as well as with the implementation of neoliberal capitalism in Eastern Europe, or the neocolonial appropriation of Eastern Europe as part of the European unification project. Within this framework, I would like to consider two concepts together. The first is the concept of European Apartheid proposed by French philosopher tienne Balibar in the 1990s and beginning of 2000s and the other is the concept of Exception to Neoliberalism proposed in recent years by the Chinese anthropologist and theoretician Aihwa Ong (along with the concept of Neoliberalism as Exception) who is researching and writing about the transformation of citizenship and sovereignty in South East and East Asia. Along these theoretical lines that I will elaborate further, I will have as well a case with which to conceptualize my thesis. I will analyze the semi- documentary film trilogy Kenedi by the Serbian film director elimir ilnik that presents a critique in its film format of the neoliberal migration regime under global biopolitical conditions.1
1 Cf. Rutvica Andrijasevi, Manuela Bojadijev, Notes on migration management and citizenship in the area of ex-Yugoslavia, 2004, http://www.transitmigration.org/db_transit_e/ausgabe_e.php?inhaltID=116, retrieved on March 31, 2010.

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime I would propose something that may, at first, seem paradoxical, but is not. Namely, my thesis in this text is that Exception to Neoliberalism is not just functioning outside of the First capitalist world as Ong argues, but that it is, on the contrary, functional in the new Europe and in the First capitalist world today as well. As an outcome of this relation, European Apartheid has been brought into existence and maintained. We can see it working when witness to atrocious segregation of migrants in the EU but also in the process of EU unification which enforces the cleansing of the Western Europe of refugees, asylum seekers and so- called illegal immigrants through brutal deportations to their countries of origin or countries that are (potential) candidates for EU membership. The construction, organization and administration of the borders in Europe (and in other parts of the world) after 1989 has to do with the creation of world regions or zones of growth and zones of poverty, zones of life and zones of death, zones of rights and zones of non-rights that are created through the processes of globalization of capital. Thus, in these zones the binary division of the world into two (as it was the case in the time of the Cold War) is no longer functional but instead there exists a very complicated network of zones spread throughout the world in its every corner there exists a zone of prosperity and life and a zone of poverty and death. These zones represent not only simple geographical divisions, but divisions of subjectivities, knowledge etc. as well. 2 In order to produce and maintain the zones of prosperity, extremely violent measurements in governing the zones of poverty have to be introduced. Balibar wrote extensively on the issue of European citizenship and its (im)possibility. He maintains that European citizenship created as part of the
2 Cf. tienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Translation/Transnation), Princeton University Press, 2004; Marina Grini, Analysis of the exhibition Gender Check Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe Museum of Modern Art, (MUMOK), Vienna, November 2009/February 2010, 2009, http://eipcp.net/policies/grzinic/en, retrieved on March 31, 2010. ; Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Duke University Press, 2006.

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime European integration process and as an exclusive citizenship, not open to all living in Europe, is the main blockage to democracy in the new Europe. European citizenship is grounded in national citizenships, meaning that all those having a citizenship of one of the member countries automatically have EU citizenship (entailing the right to vote in the EU elections, address the Court of Justice of the European Union, etc). Most of the migrants who are living in European space are overexploited, living in a constantly precarious situation and vulnerable regarding social and political rights, and are excluded from that citizenship. He argues: European citizenship within the limits of the currently existing union, is not conceived of as a recognition of the rights and contributions of all the communities present upon the European soil, but as a postcolonial isolation of native and nonnative populations. This exposes the European community to the reactive development of all sorts of identitarian obsessions, following the model of mutual reinforcement of exclusions and communitarianisms (including national, secular, and republican communitarianisms) promoted by globalization. This situation leads him to see the current development of true European apartheid, advancing concurrently with the formal institutions of European citizenship and, in the long term, constituting an essential element of the blockage of European unification as a democratic constitution.3 The other concept that I want to consider here is the concept of Exception to Neoliberalism that Aihwa Ong proposed (along with the concept of Neoliberalism as Exception). Bringing together two concepts otherwise discussed separately the concept of neoliberalism and the concept of exception she researches contemporary mutations in citizenship and sovereignty in Asian countries whose governments have selectively adopted neoliberal forms in creating economic zones and imposing market criteria on citizenship i.e. in emerging countries Cf. tienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Translation/Transnation), Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 170. ultrainput.com 80
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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime where neoliberalism itself is not the general characteristic of technologies of governing. On one hand, Ong discusses neoliberalism not as an economic doctrine but as a governmentality or technology of governing that is a profoundly active way of rationalizing governing and self-governing in order to optimize it. As she puts it: In contemporary times, neoliberal rationality informs action by many regimes and furnishes the concepts that inform the government of free individuals who are then induced to self-manage according to market principles of discipline, efficiency, and competitiveness. On the other hand, in contrast to Giorgio Agamben, whose concept of bare life and bios Ong criticizes because of its binary logic, she conceptualizes the exception more broadly, as an extraordinary departure in policy that can be deployed to include as well as to exclude. In that context Ong argues that Neoliberalism as exception is introduced in sites of transformation where market-driven calculations are being introduced in the management of populations and the administration of special spaces () At the same time, exceptions to neoliberalism are also invoked, in political decisions, to exclude populations and places from neoliberal calculations and choices .4 What she finds distinctive about Asian postdevelopmentalism and what is for us significant is a checkered geography of governing resulting not from an anemic state apparatus but from a deliberative neoliberal calculation as to which populations are advantageous or not advantageous in appealing global markets. The development of such postdevelopmental logic in effect produces a postdevelopmental geography the multiplication of differentiated zones of
4 Cf. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Duke

University Press, 2006, pp. 35.

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime governing across the national territory that has specific political effect.5 Furthermore, she points out: ...the neoliberal stress on economic borderlessness has induced the creation of multiple political spaces and techniques for differentiated governing within the national terrain. Especially in emerging, postcolonial contexts, varied techniques of government rely on controlling and regulating populations in relationship to differentiated spaces of governance, with a graduated effect on sovereignty, and on citizenship.6 Thus, she recognizes diverse modes of government disciplinary, regulatory or pastoral that administer populations in terms of their relevance to global capital. Precisely this is what she calls graduated or variegated sovereignty. 7 How this differentiated administration of populations operates in the case of the EU integration project, we can see in the post-Yugoslavian space, particularly in the case of Serbia. The Kenedi Trilogy I am here using as an example, a film trilogy titled Kenedi Trilogy by elimir ilnik, a film director from Novi Sad. The trilogy is named after the main character Kenedi, a Roma person who is coercively deported from a EU country (in this case Germany) back to Serbia. In 2002 ilnik was confronted with the absurd situation that in the city of Novi Sad, many of his neighbors were, all of a sudden, fluently German speaking persons. This was a result of the Readmission Agreement that the Serbian government signed with Germany as part of the process of EU integration and that allowed Germany numerous instantaneous brutal deportations of refugees, asylum seekers and so called illegal immigrants
5 6 7

Ibid, pp. 77 78. Ibid. Ibid.

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime originating from Serbia back to Serbia. Having himself experienced migration in Germany and being sensitive to marginalized social groups, ilnik became interested in this paradoxical social and political situation in which, on the one hand, the EU lays claims to democracy and human rights while, on the other hand, treats some of the people living on its territory as non-humans.

The outcome of ilniks interest was the Kenedi Trilogy which consists of the following semi-documentary/semi-feature films: Kenedi Goes Back Home (2003), Kenedi Lost and Found (2005) and Kenedi is Getting Married (2007). In the first part Kenedi is introduced. He is a real character and presents himself with his real name Kenedi. He is a young Roma from Kosovo whose family has been living in Germany for 48 years. Unexpectedly, in the middle of the night in the 2000s, German special police brutally arrested him, beating him up and handcuffing him as if he was a criminal. Shortly after this, he was deported to Serbia. Having nobody and nothing in Serbia (his family originated from Kosovo, where during the war they lost all belongings and property) and separated from his family, Kenedi starts his struggle for survival in the extremely anti-Roma surroundings of Serbia, where, due to racial discriminations and society divisions, Roma are forced to live in slums, humiliated, expelled, violently attacked and even killed.8 Thus, Kenedi is compelled to work in clandestine employment doing the worst and hardest jobs. Having no place to sleep, he lives in his car. He drives two-three times a week to the airport expecting his family members to be deported as well. In the airport, he meets other expelled Roma families or individuals whom he offers a ride as if he was a taxi driver. These families or individuals, who were war refuges or asylum seekers in Germany, though, as migrants they lived in constant fear of being thrown out of
8 About anti-Romaism in Serbia and Europe see my text: Contention of Antiromaism as a Part of the Process of Decoloniality of Europe, in Reartikulacija, no. 7, Ljubljana 2009, http://www.reartikulacija.org/?p=647, retrieved on March 31, 2010.

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime the country, they nevertheless share their experiences about the good life in Germany on one side and the brutality of the coercive deportations from Germany that always happened in the middle of the night without any prior announcement on the other. They were virtually forced to pack and leave in thirty minutes. At the airport, they were robbed by the German police (all the money that they possessed was taken away from them!). Arriving in Belgrade airport most of them are immediately transformed into homeless, having no money and no place to stay and being offered no state assistance. Hence, they end up in some of the numerous slums in Serbia.9 Their children are not accepted in Serbian schools as their parents mostly didnt manage to bring with them all the necessary documents and prepare for their new life or simply because they dont understand a word of Serbian as they were born and grew up in Germany. Having the legal stigma of being expelled from the EU they have no chance of going back legally to the country where they had lived for decade(s).10 But, in spite of this desperate and humiliating situation, the film illustrates the conflictual side of migration, and what happens when subjects refuse to accept the control and confinement imposed upon them. The second and third parts of the film trilogy reveal Kenedis persistence in his struggle to migrate back to the EU, a struggle that subverts the politics of identity inherent to neo-liberalism. Travel becomes the law, becoming becomes the code () Becoming imperceptible is the most precise and effective tool migrants employ to oppose the individualizing, quantifying, and representational pressures of the settled, constituted geopolitical power.11 Thus, Kenedi is More about Belgrade slums see above footnote and Lorenc Agerman, Eduard Frojdman, Djan Gildji, Beograd Gazela Vodi kroz sirotinjsko naselje [Belgrade Gazela: Travel Guide to a Slum], RENDE, Belgrade, 2009; Lorenz Aggermann, Eduard Freudmann, Can Glc, Beograd Gazela Reisefhrer in eine Elendssiedlung, Drava Verlag, Klagenfurt, 2008.
10 Similar reports appear in scientific research: Rutvica Andrijasevi, Manuela Bojadijev, Notes on migration management and citizenship in the area of ex-Yugoslavia, Ibid; About conditions upon arrival see: Ivan Zlati, Ponovo zajedno![Together again!], Z Magazin Balkan, no. 3, Belgrade, 2007;

11 Dimitris Papadopoulos, Vassilis Tsianos, The Autonomy of Migration: The Animals of Undocumented Mobility, in: Anna Hickey-Moody, Peta Malins, eds., Deleuzian Encounters. Studies in Contemporary Social Issues, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007; http://translate.eipcp.net/strands/02/papadopoulostsianos-strands01en, retrieved on March 31, 2010.

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime constantly in a state of becoming: becoming a construction worker, becoming a sex worker, becoming gay Migration adapts differently to each particular context, changes its faces, links unexpected social actors together, absorbs and reshapes the sovereign dynamics targeting its control. Migration is arbitrary in its flows, de-individualised, and constitutive of new transnational spaces which exceed and neutralize sovereign politics () Migration is the sister of transience, produces mixed forms, menwomen, new species () Dis-identification=being everyone. Because, you must be everyone in order to be everywhere.12 In an interview with ilnik, Hito Steyerl remarked that this film shows the co- production of the figure of the Gypsy by two complementary forces, namely the Western European biopolitical bureaucracy and the local, in this case Serbian, elites both depict and give food to our imagination about the Roma as homeless, illiterate, poor and completely depraved. This film also depicts a process that documents how common workers and schoolchildren are being transformed into Gypsies by forcefully uprooting them from their environment and making them homeless. But ilniks film also shows that the Roma protagonists keep their dignity, even against all odds.13 What interests us here is how the ideological mechanism that produces the fiction of race/ethnicity (in our example Gipsies) functions in the context of EU integration. In order to fully understand it I would make a detour into recent developments in the relationship between the EU and Serbia.
12 Ibid. 13 Cf. An Interview with ilnik by Marina Grini, Ljubljana/Vienna and Hito Steyerl, Berlin, in ART- e-FACT, strategies of resistance, no. 3, 2004, http://artefact.mi2.hr/_a03/lang_en/art_zilnik_en.htm, retrieved on March 31, 2010.

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime Producing Race/Ethnicity in the EU In December 2009, breaking news appeared: The EU is going to award Serbia (along with two more former Yugoslavian republics Macedonia and Montenegro) with membership of the White Schengen List two weeks earlier than was planned. This is, said EU officials, a Christmas present for Serbia!14 Serbian membership on the White Schengen List is the outcome of a set of reforms and regulations called the Road map to Visa liberalization, set up with the aim of achieving a visa free regime for Serbian citizens traveling to the Schengen Area.15 This means that Serbian citizens are now free to travel to Schengen countries without being exposed to the complicated procedure (that is not affordable for everybody) of issuing visa, as in former days. At the same time, it represents one step further for Serbia in the EU integration process. The agreement was supposed to start from 01.01.2010 but abruptly, as was said in the media, EU officials decided to give a Christmas present to Serbia stating that the agreement is going to start from 19.12.2009 so that Serbian citizens can visit their families in the Diaspora to spend the Christmas holidays together (as if those religious Serbs were celebrating Christmas according to the Gregorian calendar?!). It would be challenging to make an additional analysis of this infantilization of Serbia (and other countries from the region16) which is given a Christmas present by the EU, as well as an analysis of the integration regime excluding from the White Schengen List all those Western Balkans countries
Cf. http://www.vesti-online.com/Vesti/Srbija/5285/Ren-Ukidanje-viza--poklon-za-Bozic; http://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2009&mm=11&dd=30&nav_category=11&nav_id=39540, retrieved on March 31, 2010.
15 Schengen is a name for an agreement that provides for the removal of border controls between the EU countries while constructing a Fortress Europe. On the construction of new forms of insecurity in EU in relation to its outer borders see: William Walters & Jens Henrik Haahr, Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration, London: Routledge, 2005., pp 91 114. 16 In media Bosnia and Albania were addressed as the countries that didnt make their homework and thus could not enter the White Schengen List. http://derstandard.at/1259280843192/Serben- Montenegriner-und-Mazedonier-duerfen-visafrei-in-EU-einreisen, retrieved on March 31, 2010.

14

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime where Islam is the predominant religion thus establishing new hierarchies in the region.
17Such

an analysis would reveal the deeply and fundamentally

conservative Christian and nationalist character of the EU that must be seen in relation to colonial appropriation by Christian western European countries. Unfortunately, there is not enough space in this paper for that. In order for some to be granted the right of freedom of movement in Europe (they can stay only a limited amount of days in the EU!) a price had to be paid, meaning that others had to be transformed into Gypsies, homeless, i.e. into bare life.18 It was repeatedly said in the media for the last few years that the key conditions for the White Schengen List, were numerous bilateral readmission agreements between the EU countries and Serbia and one common readmission agreement between the EU and Serbia. 19 These agreements imply deporting to Serbia not only 150 00020 refugees, asylum seekers and so called illegal immigrants living in the EU holding a Yugoslav passport21 but also readmission of all those coming from a third country who entered EU territory illegally via Serbia. Moreover, for membership of the White Schengen List other processes were imposed by the EU. New racist laws and strategies were implemented such as (besides many others): Border Strategy, Strategy for the Suppression of Illegal Migration and Migration Management Strategy in accordance with EU standards and requirements. One of the outcomes of these new laws, which are
17 In the moment when this text was written Albania and Bosnia and Herzegovina were not members of the the White Schengen List. However, their later acceptance on 8. 11. 2010 doesn't bring into question the analysis I made here.
18 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, HOMO SACER, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998.

Some of these agreements were signed as early as in 1996 in the time of Miloevi rule, but were effectively activated after the war in Kosovo and after the change of the regime in Serbia in 2000. The one with EU was signed in 2008.
20 Source: http://www.opstina-negotin.org.yu/article.php?lg=sr&id_article=980, retrieved on December 18, 2009. 21 Though Yugoslavia doesnt exist anymore, most of Serbs still hold the passports with the old name of the state. At the moment the procedure of changing them for the new biometric (!) passports where Republic Serbia is written, is going on. The whole procedure was the demand of the EU and its security apparatus therefore biometric passports.

19

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime mainly just copy-pasted from the EU (like all other new laws in Serbia after 200022) will be that the so called illegal immigrants who are caught by police in Serbia on their trajectory to the EU and who then decide to seek asylum must stay in Serbia and cannot legally migrate to the EU, meaning that Serbia will become not just a transit zone on their way to the EU but a non-chosen destination. In the last few years new camps (called centers) for illegal immigrants and asylum seekers have been opened and are operating in Serbia. Consequently, Serbia (and the Western Balkans) is being transformed into the outer security zone of the EU (the inner is the border of the Schengen Area). Therefore, in order to be a privileged member of the White Schengen List, Serbia (and the non-Islamic part of the Western Balkans) had to be transformed into a disastrous filtering zone imposing an enormous security and legally repressive apparatus, a process that other countries of Eastern Europe that are now members of the EU already passed through (for instance the former Yugoslav republic Slovenia). The brutality and violence imposed by the EU and Germany as the member country that we see in ilniks film, is actually working hand in hand with the brutality and violence imposed by its potential candidate23 for admission the country of Serbia, which is ready to do everything that the EU prescribes, in order to become a member. The negotiations for the Stabilization and Association Agreement that started between the Serbian government and the EU as early as in 2005 but were prepared for intensively after 2000 (when the Miloevi regime was
Mlaan Dinki, Minister of Economy and Regional Development and as a Deputy Prime Minister stated that Serbia has never been writing its own laws, after 2000 we have been mostly coping European Union laws. http://www.b92.net/info/emisije/insajder.php?yyyy=2007&mm=04&nav_id=240657, retrieved on March 31, 2010.
23 Serbia doesnt have yet the official status of the EU candidate country. One of the main reasons is that Serbia didnt deliver major war criminals to the United Nations International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. BUT Serbia behaves as if it is a candidate meaning that all structural changes in economy, society and politics expected from the side of the EU are being made.

22

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime overthrown) are actually not at all negotiations in the real sense of the word. From the side of the EU, all rules and conditions are set in advance with treaties such as The Treaty of Rome, The Maastricht Treaty etc. Serbia and other countries that are in the process of joining the EU are not in a position to negotiate anything! They are turned into pure objects of neocolonial EU intervention (political, social, economical and cultural) with economics and new market exploitation opportunities as the main factor of interest of the EU in the region and as the main engine of integration. The EU is enforcing a set of requirements, standards and values that Serbia (and other countries in the region) has to meet, implement and demonstrate. One day (nobody knows when), when Serbia proves that it is mature and when the EU has earned enough profit from the difference in life standard and salaries in this region, Serbia can probably become a part of Fortress Europe.24 Referring to Foucault, Tihomir Topuzovksi, an artist and theorist from Macedonia recently analyzed the condition in which the countries of the Western Balkans are the subjects of the panoptical perspective of the European Union (Serbia is part of the constructed zone named Western Balkans) whose aim is to turn these countries into a replica of the EU. The European Union, through the distribution of knowledge markers that enable the functioning of expert teams, is permanently supervising the Western Balkans; it is monitoring the processes that should be a kind of training and preparation for participation in the European Union (from the execution of reforms to a whole range of regulations which aim at reshaping the region). Practicing the political values that are valid for the European Union is a process of insemination. Now, this region is put under the tutorship of the European Union in order to create real political values in the region for the future. As an illustration, the entire program created for this region is a therapy prescribed by an instance of experts. Those An excellent analysis of much more extreme relation of this kind (between Kosovo and the international administration) was given by Vjollca Krasniqi at the symposium Reading Gender. Art, Power and Politics of Representation in Eastern Europe, in MUMOK, Vienna, 13 November 2009. The title of the lecture was: Returning the Gaze: Gender and Power in Kosovo. ultrainput.com 89
24

 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime implants must be necessarily accepted, since the states of the Western Balkans are in an unequal position in relation to the EU; this relation is not reciprocal. It is a relation with no exchange; a relation of difference and imbalance that includes the imperative form of speech. Furthermore, Topuzovksi describes the punishment mechanism of the EU Panopticon: The Panopticon model has been used particularly by Foucault, who defines it as homeostatic: i.e. if you dont act in compliance with the apparatus that is imposed on you, then you provoke pain on yourself.25 Apparently, Serbia, while causing no pain to itself, was advancing in its preparation for participation in the European Union and was awarded with the membership on the White Schengen List for its progress. But, sometime ago one local politician and university professor stated that, actually, the above mentioned readmission agreement is not a condition for the White Schengen List! He said that these two issues were negotiated in parallel, but that the EU expected a cooperative attitude from Serbia so that when the EU deports the so called illegal immigrants, Serbia shows a willingness to momentarily accept them, making no demands or conditions that could be understood as shifting the costs of supporting these people onto the EU.26 Therefore, we see that the EUs directives are not always in the imperative form of speech but they are actually suggestions that are given to Serbia by the EU. Apparently, Serbia takes these prescriptions deadly seriously, wanting to prove that it is a good pupil, doing extra homework.

25 Cf. Tihomir Topuzovski, "From the imagining of the Balkans to the Invention of the Western Balkans", Reartikulacija, no. 6, Ljubljana, 2009.
26 Cf. Kanjenje Srbije [Delay of Serbia], Talk between Ivo Viskovi (head of the Department of International Relations at the Faculty of Political Sciences) in Belgrade and Klara Kranjc (journalist), Kaiprst Radio Show, Radio B92, 16th October 2006. http://www.b92.net/info/emisije/kaziprst.php?yyyy=2006&mm=10&nav_id=215712, retrieved on March 31, 2010.

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime Neoliberal Calculus What is here at play is the technology of the self, the agency or the self- governance that is argued by scholars to be one of the key instruments in neoliberal govenmentality. As Aihwa Ong pointed out, neoliberal governmentality means, besides other things, self-governing in order to optimize in regard to neoliberal calculations. This means that we, as allegedly free subjects, are governed in such a way that we comply with the expectations of those that are governing us: we are expected to act in an optimal way in relation to neoliberal capitalism. In our example of neoliberal self-governance we dont have a good citizen but a whole region, a zone that is as good subject governing itself in an optimal way regarding neoliberal calculations and allocation of capital in this region. But while the whole zone of the Western Balkan is transformed into a self- governing neoliberal subjectivity, what we see in ilniks film Roma being expelled from the EU, deported to Serbia and transformed into bare life leads us to conclude that we can find in these processes a specificity of the European Union governance mechanism generated within European integration. This particularity informs us of the character of that integration and its logic. Ong discusses the concepts of Neoliberalism as Exception and Exceptions to Neoliberalism in the frame of postcolonialism, authoritarianism, and postsocialism.27 But, what we can argue on the basis of the above argumentation related to the mentioned film (and many other scientific, artistic and activist Cf. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Duke University Press, 2006, p. 14. ultrainput.com 91
27

 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime works dealing with the same issue28), is that exceptions to neoliberalism are also functional in neoliberalisms core space that is the space of the First world or Western Europe (and of course, the USA). Exceptions to neoliberalism are employed in managing and governing migrant populations in the European Union today depending on their relevance to global capital. Some of these populations are not likely to be productively used or exploited29 meaning that some of these populations are not advantageous in appealing global markets.30 As Marina Grini pointed out,31 today, the neoliberal capitalist ideology () cleans the terrain against those who are perceived by the same ideology as a non-productive part of the First world matrix. Thus, all those expelled people we talk about here, are excluded from neoliberal calculations and choices in a certain space. Therefore, a different mode of governing is employed to administer these populations. They are governed through violence in contrast to other populations that are allowed to be self-governed. Hence, it is precisely the exceptions to neoliberalism that are the condition which allow something like European Apartheid, created along with European citizenship after 1989, to be brought into existence and maintained in present day Europe. Or in other words, it is precisely the exceptions to neoliberalism that have as the outcome the fact that The EU is transformed into one giant concentration camp as Marina Grini stated in an analysis of another film by ilnik.32 Thus, we can conclude that it is the exceptions to neoliberalism that is the key logic in power in the European integration process. In our paradigmatic example, we dont have the form of governance that is normally in force in EU where
28

For example Tanja Ostoji's video Naked Life (200408).

Cf. tienne Balibar, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Translation/Transnation) Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 28. Cf. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty, Duke University Press, 2006, p. 77.
31 Cf. Marina Grini, Ex-Yugoslav Avant-garde Film Production and its Early Works seen through Biopolitics and Necropolitics, in For an Idea Against the Status Quo, Analysis and Systematization of elimir ilniks Artistic Practice, Playground produkcija, Novi Sad, 2009. 30

29

32 Ibid.

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 Marjanovi | The Racist Regime subjects are expected to be responsible, entrepreneurial, decision-making, risks- taking, owners of their own bodies etc. On the contrary, we have subjects that are not considered to be (useful) subjects or subjects of no use, subjects against whom exceptional measures such as violence and coercion are employed in order to govern, subjects that the EU wants to get rid of as soon as possible, subjects that are brutally expelled. Therefore, through interactions of exceptions of neoliberalism, European Apartheid produces what Ong terms as zones of differentiated governance zones of neoliberal self-governance and zones of governance through violence. These zones are intertwined throughout the new Europe and the globe. That is exactly the background upon which Agamben can state that the camp is a biopolitical paradigm of modernity.33 ***
Ivana Marjanovi, BA in Art History. Born in 1979, Belgrade, Serbia. PhD candidate at Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Free-lance cultural worker in the field of contemporary arts and theory. Co-founded Kontekst Gallery in Belgrade (www.kontekstgalerija.org). Published articles in books, exhibition catalogues, international magazines and online artistic and theoretical platforms such as Reartikulacija, Mute, eipcp.net, Kulturisse, Malmoe, etc. Lives and works in Vienna.

1998.
33 Cf. Giorgio Agamben, HOMO SACER, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford,

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7. Marina Grini

Decoloniality of Time and Space

Originally published in Reartikulacija (Reartikulacija, Artistic-Political-Discoursive Platform, Ljubljana, 2010) Reartikulacija #10,11,12,13, www.reartikulacija.org

When I was asked to talk about time and space as artistic media in the 1960s and 1970s, this meant to talk about performance art from that period. The performances from that period were those where time and space (mostly in relation to or with the help of video recordings) were used as a material for construction of Western subjectivity. But I am interested in thinking about performance through its reenactment, which we can see everywhere around us these days. A major trend nowadays by artists is to repeat their own performances from the past, or to reenact some other performances from the past as a core of their art works, or to engage in a performative repetition of paradigmatic terms. The latter is best illustrated with the reusing of the word former from former Eastern Europe (that describes a precise geopolitical condition) for an empty performative but fully ideological move of de-re-framing of what is functioning today powerfully as Western Europe. The latter wants us to think that is reborn presently as former Western Europe. But more about this in the final part of the text. Nevertheless, at the center of all these cases, from art works to discourses, remains the logic of repetition, being as well the logic of the functioning of global capitalism. As already developed in my previous texts for Reartikulacija, Santiago Lpez Petit claims in his book Global Mobilization: Brief Treatise for Attacking Reality (2009), that global capitalism is an event and not a process, as global capitalism is nothing else but the repetition of one single event, which is the unrestrainment of capital (in Spanish des(z)boc(ka)amiento), which can be more colloquially grasped as the unrestraining or unleashing of capital. Different than previous historical forms of capitalism, global capitalism requires two ultrainput.com 94

 repetitions working at once. These two repetitions are the founding repetition and the de-foundational repetition. They both create a rather paradoxical time and space, an entanglement of time and space, a term also used by Achille Mbembe when writing about the postcolony on Africa in 2001, stating that power and capital are acquiring a new dimension, that of an entanglement. So what is this all about? On the one side, with the founding repetition, the system of hierarchy is being constantly reestablished, leading to a constant reconstruction of a center and of a periphery; and on the other side, the de- foundational repetition presents itself as the erosion of hierarchies, producing dispersion, multiplicity and multi-reality. In the 1960s and 1970s, unlike today, we only had the repetition of the center and the periphery. This is why instead of the global world, we would talk about the cold world whoops, Cold War functioning with the dividing of the world into two. But today is about two repetitions, repeated at any moment and in any place, that entangle the world. This entanglement is not a plural space of the social, political and economical, as often stated. On the contrary, it is a situation that does not allow for any kind of division. Entanglement means owning, and not unifying. In the end, it is a situation of co-propriety of power and capital. This is why, when somebody from lets say Ukraine or Moldavia (I cannot say Slovenia, as we are the model of servitude to global capitalism), talks about a center and periphery, the well-educated Westerners laugh about what they term the old division, as what they see (as the French would say) is multiplicit, multi-ralit This was precisely the narration of Sarkozy that stated in his infamous Dakar speech, when visiting Senegal in 2007, Oh, you Africans, you talk about colonialism, but it was not so horrible, and today you have all these opportunities As argued by Mbembe, it was unthinkable that this clown, the product of the horrendous West European, French colonialism, could come to Africa today and claim that Africans have to stop living in the past, and accept the benefits of colonialism. But from time to time, amidst this multiplicity and multi-reality, the police come, as they did in Greece when the students protested, and, without any openness towards the multiplicity of the students multi-reality, imprisoned hundreds of them at the university campus, or in France, in the meantime, when hundreds of ultrainput.com 95

 Roma families were sent back to the periphery of the European Union, to Romania, and look we could see the foundational repetition working quite mercilessly, and even more being backed up by, yes, hundreds of the EU laws that from Brussels democratically advise the EU member states. In case of France the EU protested, but the point is that precisely out of the EUs multiplicity of hegemonic directions, that support and reinforce the EU institutional racism, was France able to deport hundreds of Roma families to the, as it is termed non- existent, periphery of EU. To understand the difference of the logic of the repetition in contemporary art and culture in the 1970s, and today, when in global capitalism the two repetitions repeat at once, I will make a detour to contemporary performative arts. The 1970s are important as they are seen as a line of division between two forms of labor, that of Fordism and that of post-Fordism, which are also two periods in capitalism that mark the radical change in the way in which the processes of exploitation are conducted and the possibilities of resistance conceived. Post-Fordist mobility and precarity presently redefine migration processes, hiding the internal logic of global capitalism that has a tendency to reestablish slavery as the mode of labour in order to make more profit (graspable in the recent months, with the EU imposing the lifelong working period until death, so to speak, and with the EU policy proposing pensions below the guaranteed minimum for life, etc.). At this point, our main thesis is that in the performance art from the 1970s, which is presented as an antithesis to contemporary reenactments, that is, as something original, is, in fact, already at work a repetition, precisely the foundational one, the one that repeats the center and periphery, and the self- sufficiency of the Western Institution of Art. This is a provocative statement as the Western performance art from the 1970s was always seen as something non-mediated and therefore an original, being on the other side of todays reenactments. The first performance I want to analyze is from 2009, has a title Movement.Privatized and was conceived and realized by Ana Hoffner, Austrian performer of the new generation. It starts with the reenactment of a video performance by the American artist Bruce Nauman from 19671968 entitled ultrainput.com 96

 Walking in an exaggerated manner in the perimeters of a square. (Presented in Reartikulacija, No. 9, 2009). Hoffner, while repeating it, differently from Nauman, explains it; the analysis she points out while reenacting Naumans work is her work. I will expose some of the points brought up by Hoffner. I quote: Naumans movement, in the privacy of his studio, exploring the relationship between the body and the space, was recorded by a camera, just like mine Hoffner states in her performance in order to be accessible to the audience. His walk is exaggerated it is excessive, elegant, and perhaps even existential. Like many artists from that period, Nauman shows art as a process, as an activity, as work. This work, however, is not just a representation of the so-called reality. Art is something that is going on. Bruce Naumans walk within the perimeters of the square can be art as well. The artist walks in his studio, like a master in his house, a citizen in his country. Nauman is, therefore, I would say, as pointed out by Hoffners interpretation, completely self-sufficient just as is the art system that supported him, there was no evidence of the world surrounding Nauman in his performance from the 1970s. Hoffner stated that the square has to be specifically emphasized as a symbol of abstraction and erasure in modernity. She explains that the square not only forms a part of an art work, but it also marks the mode of functioning of capitalism, and it is maintained through its continuous proclamation of itself as the centre that absorbs all peripheries. It functions, I would argue, repeating the center of Western capitalism as being completely self-sufficient to itself. The Other in this situation is a total periphery, a desert, a nonexistent entity. The second reference comes from another reenactment by Ana Hoffner, performed in 2010, entitled Im Too Sad to Tell You, Bosnian Girl. Hoffners performance begins with her crying and, as she states, from that moment on, she records her live performance. Hoffners crying repeats the performance by Bas Jan Ader, a Dutch video artist, who cried for the camera, too, and filmed his tears in 1971, entitling his work Im Too Sad to Tell You. You can find, as with Nauman, the original online on YouTube. If you want to get the whole performance Im Too Sad to Tell You, Bosnian Girl by Ana Hoffner, you will have to invite her and pay her!

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 Hoffner explains: Bas Jan Ader is so sad he cant even say why, there are no words that can describe his sadness, and therefore, there should be no further explanation. Instead, the emotions themselves hold the validity. Their form becomes the content of an artistic work. Im Too Sad to Tell You the title suggests that the reason for Bas Jan Aders tears is secondary, he hammers at the intensity of emotions, at their justification as emotions, independent of the context of their emergence. If Jan Bas Ader was crying because of the bloody colonial past of the Netherlands, of its history of colonizing other territories, enslaving, mutilating, killing others this we cannot know. However, Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, in his essay entitled Live and Let Die: Colonial Sovereignties and the Death Worlds of Necrocapitalism (Reartikulacija, No. 3, 2008), explains this accurately. He talks about the Dutch East Indies Company practices of conquering markets, eliminating competition, securing cheap sources of raw material supply, building strategic alliances, etc. But lets be clear, it is not a secret that no one was /is interested in the reasons, since the crying is sufficient; the sorrow of the Western artist, this is enough, no matter why. What I want to say is that, for Bas Jan Ader, the Other, the remainder, the rest of the Dutch social bond, in the 1970s, does not need any historical explanation. As commented by Hoffner, Bas Jan Ader puts the observation of himself into the contents of an artistic work. In his work, in the 1970s, the Other, the remainder, the former colonized, like the migrant today, is just an insignificant product, since the whole structure, the social link, the time and space, they all serve the re/production of the Western subject, which is what is put at its center. The remainder does not count. The remainder can thus also be read as the work that seems to be wasted and that nobody knows what to do with except for, maybe, as stated by Alenka Zupani, when there is an attempt to regulate it through the science of ethics. For us, on the contrary, the way in which the remainder, the thing, the object, the Other, will be articulated is of vital importance, as this articulation opens the question of the place of art in politics. This is why the title of Hoffners performance has the addendum Bosnian girl it says: Im too sad to tell you, ultrainput.com 98

 Bosnian Girl! That gives us a precise point of the possible radical political rearticulation of time and space of contemporary Dutch society, and I will say of the new Europe as well, as includes in its reenactment the traumatic remainder of contemporary Europe, the Srebrenica genocide in 1995, and the war in BiH. If we return to Bas Jan Ader, what a waste of tears for the loss that is only for himself, as we have no clue why he was crying, though from this waste, the institution of art and the society makes a surplus enjoyment, a profit for itself. In Bas Jan Aders case, we have the knowledge that does not know itself to such an extent that it can actually be prescribed in the manual for contemporary reenactments. This is why Lacan, in his seminar from 1969-70, in the book XVII, On the other side of psychoanalysis, comes out with a rather surprising claim (as emphasized by Zupani) that what is being stolen from the slave (and appropriated by the master) is not the slaves work, but his knowledge. That is why the content of the 1970s western performances is seen as an original, while what is in fact being repeated under this originality is the western art autonomy (not being capable to think of anything else than of its empty institutional autonomy as its key ideology), reproducing as well the simple logic of the Cold War division between the West, as the center, and everything else, as its non-existent periphery.

Therefore, the two major points are: in the performances by Western artists of the 1970s, contrary to common thinking that we have to do with an original art work, already a singular repetition is at stake, the foundational repetition that left the content so to speak untouched, as what is repeated is the Western arts ideology of its autonomy; in the 2000s, the reenactment repeats again the foundational repetition of the center and of the periphery, but it is now hidden beneath its form. This form is today only an aesthetical style, to such an extent that is more and more prescribed in manuals for contemporary reenactments of past performances. What we get today is not just an upside (turned) down (the supposedly original performance content being reenacted as an empty stylish form), but what we get is the contemporary performative reenacted Western ideology (of autonomy of art) made again so to say unconscious, presented now in the form of a game or joke to which is given a life of its own. ultrainput.com 99

How does this reenactment work in the context of the so-called relation in between East and West of Europe? Former Eastern Europe and present Western Europe are no longer in opposition today, but in relation of repetition. An excellent case of such a repetition is the project Former West that was started in The Netherlands as an International Research, Publishing and Exhibition Project, for the period 20092012, curated by Charles Esche, Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhombergn (http://www.formerwest.org). Former West is not at all a joke, although it could be seen as such, but is a perfect logic of repetition, as the key logic of the global capitalism of today. What the project does? It claims today a perverse demand of equal redistribution of responsibility and positions between the East and West of Europe. That is, it is answering as well specifically to the demand urgently imposed by Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall claiming that East Germany and West Germany are to become equally outdated. This is of course abundantly financially supported by new European cultural financial institutions.

In the case of Eastern Europe, the former means that the processes of evacuation, abstraction, expropriation imposed by the West are actually over; as it was proclaimed by Germany in 2009, celebrating its 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with the slogan: Come, come in the country without borders (and I will say without memory as well). But in the case of the former (as it should be at least written) Western Europe it implies a purely performative, empty, speculative gesture. While the East is excluded more and more from the materiality of its history, knowledge, memory, etc., the West is just performing it. It plays with a speculative format of itself; it wants us to think that its roots of power and capital are fictional! But this is not a strange move today, as it comes in a time when we talk about financialization; the word former in front of West presents a speculative matrix that gives the West the possibility to not be conscious of its own historical and present hegemonic power and therefore not responsible for it. This speculative character of the former Western Europe resembles with perfect accuracy the speculative character of financial capitalism at the present, as well ultrainput.com 100

 as its crisis. Be sure that in the future we can expect projects, symposia and statements in which the imperial colonizing forces, Britain, France, Netherlands, etc., will try to prove how they were also colonized in the past, and that what is happening to them in the present is the result of some strange forces having nothing to do with the internal logic of capitalism itself that has two drives only, making profit at any cost and privatization. All these projects imply that it is possible today, as we are all in the same merde, or simply put crisis shit (however, what is forgotten is that this was produced by the First Capitalist World), to talk about former Western Europe in the same way as we talked about the former Eastern Europe in the last 20 years. Former West is presented as an unquestionable fact, not even as a thesis, as the former West does not imply not even quotation marks.

Former Eastern Europe is not an adjective, but a placeholder in the time that is accelerated to such a degree that the politics of memory presents itself as a memory of what was once political. What was once political is transformed through the perfomative repetition into pure a ideological knowledge, but with a proviso saying that therefore we should not be preoccupied with it, as its all just a pure process of performativity anyway. With the performative repetition, the processes of voiding, emptying, extracting, eschewing are going on. The former Western Europe makes imaginary what has already been identified as material in the former Eastern Europe, it transforms the materiality of past knowledge, of histories and strategies into imaginary levels. To put it differently, what was important at the level of content (the materiality of a certain history) is now made simply obsolete, ridiculous. Or, the now reborn former West, the old colonial power, wants to convince us that it is capable for a process of decolonization, but, as stated by Achille Mbembe, without self-decolonizing itself. Similarly to financialization this new decolonization is a fictive decolonization. As Mbembe explains fictive decolonization is decolonization without democratization, or, as what we see in the European Union fictive decolonization is decolonization without contesting its structural racism. The structures of exploitation, inequality and racism stay in such a way untouched in the EU, more accurately they are reinforced; the consequences are disastrous. ultrainput.com 101


The European Union between Free Market and Fascism - A Reader. Ultra, ultrainput.com. April, 2011. All rights dependent on the copyright policy of the original source of the text and the ultrainput.com copyright policy.

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