Madalena Meyer-Resende Chair

Manuela Boatcă Discussant

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Peripherisation and national sovereignty claims. Undisciplined notes on the Italian case

The current re-emergence of national sovereignty claims appear as a most perverse effect of recent developments in European integration. Indeed, rather than fostering social and political integration, economic integration has sharpened the social and territorial inequalities of European countries. Convergence criteria have pressed southern countries into a permanent process of adaptation to the virtuous countries, creating and promoting several administrative and organisational devices to re-frame socio-spatial configurations according to European competitiveness norms. Through an undisciplined analysis of the case of Italy, the paper argues that the nationalistic sovereignty claims currently promoted by social and political forces can be seen as a perverse effect of the combination of a symbolical-institutional framework of subsidiarity and EU economic governmentalities. The case of the discursive production of the Italian Northern League (Lega Nord) will be used as an example. Rising from a regionalist movement aiming to strengthen economic integration with the industrial German core in the 90s, and racialising southern laziness as the source of Italian decline, the Italian Lega Nord has, nowadays, converted into a nationalistic populist force. It is pragmatically oriented towards restoring national economic and political sovereignty to resist a peripherisation led by EU regulatory apparatuses, while functionally producing a racialised otherness to sustain Italy’s internationally oriented domestic industrial and agricultural sectors. The paper analyses how the dynamics of centre-periphery constructions represent the institutional and discursive terrain from which this new Italian nationalism has consolidated itself.

Gerardo Costabile Nicoletta

(University of Naples, Federico II):

 

Conflicts over sovereignty in the 2012 Euro crisis

This contribution explores struggles over economic sovereignty in the context of the 2012 European sovereign debt crisis. Then, speculative pressures on sovereign debts were on the rise. Spain’s bail-out in early June didn’t curb instability, and Rajoy’s denial of a bail-out caused confusion. Only Draghi’s proclamation that the ECB would do “whatever it takes” to protect the single currency brought devaluation dynamics to a halt. The paper shows how, in that moment, the EU’s ‘legal normalcy’ is transformed allowing for new struggles over sovereignty and peripherality to emerge. It uses Critical Discourse Analysis to dissect discourses of the President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi; of Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy; and editorial reactions from the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Le Monde, El País. In that analysis, it is shown how both Draghi and Rajoy conjure up a moment of existential threat and extraordinary politics, while at the same time depoliticizing their policies by pointing out they complied with EU law. This strategic ambivalence of exceptionality and compliance allowed Rajoy to obtain better conditions for Spain's bail-out, while Draghi’s statement stopped the crisis without a single Euro being spent on bailouts. The paper concludes that the ambivalence about exceptionality, on the one hand, and compliance, on the other, implied a deviation from European “legal normalcy”. It calls for a revision of the Copenhagen School’s concept of securitization that also considers the centrality of language.

Galvão Debelle dos Santos

Autonomous University of Barcelona

 

Governing catch-up, policing space: towards a discursive political economy of peripherisation within the European Union

The recent economic and political crises in the European Union have laid bare growing socio-spatial disparities and political-economic hierarchies. They reveal in deepened polarisation of prospering and marginalised regions and in the symbolic confrontation of representatives of perceived political centres and peripheries of the European Union. This paper is a first attempt to grasp these developments as moves of peripherisation that are partially, but systematically, linked to European economic integration and have been perpetuated by recent efforts to restore the crisis-struck European economic and monetary union. The objective is to account for both political-economic and discursive aspects of periphery-building in the European Union after the Eurozone crisis, in what could be called a discursive political economy of peripherisation. After setting a relational and constructionist notion of periphery, the paper introduces three dimensions, in which EU-related peripherisation can be studied: political-economic dependencies as they reveal in dependency- and regulation-theoretical analyses of the Internal Market; the construction of peripherality and centrality showing in an analysis of narratives of the Eurozone crisis; and the policing of EU economic space disclosed by a governmentality study of the new instruments of macroeconomic coordination.

Amelie Kutter