Bordering Humanism: Life and Death on the Margins of Europe

Abstract

This article addresses the increasing militarisation of the Italian borders and the establishment of detention centres reminiscent of concentration camps as a state response to potential immigrants, asylum seekers and others. We suggest that this militarisation should be understood as part of the remaking of the Italian state in relation to recent Italian political and economic history and the current hegemonic social and political ethos in Europe more generally. Since early 1990s, European, and specifically Italian ideology has embraced a neoliberal ethos of individualism and cultural particularity that encourages the politicisation of exclusionary regional and national geographies and the intensified policing of the borders. In the current political and economic context, non-Europeans from poor countries seeking entry into Italy are categorised as outsiders and therefore non-human. The ethos made popular by Italian political parties since the l990s degrades moral claims, extracts citizens from their embeddedness in social relations, and wipes out any possible space for the purely human being.