Securitizations of Identities and Racial Eastern-Europeanization

In The Threat of Race, David Theo Goldberg (2009) unpacks the specificities of what regionalized racisms—sets of materially, demographically, historically and conceptually distinct ways in which ‘race’ acts in different geographic contexts, mobilizing various kinds of securitization narratives. His chapter on racial Europeanization focuses exclusively on Western Europe, begging for the examination of the specificities of an Eastern European racism, which, this paper argues, is indeed in many ways distinct. The argument claims that contemporary racial Eastern-Europeanization, in which the figure of the Roma abounds as radical and unassimilable other, must be placed, in a relational way, in the wider context of the subalternization of Eastern Europe in the process of ‘Europeanization’: the expansion of the European Union project towards the East. The paper highlights the ambivalent role of the EU’s policies and politics towards minority protection in the East, against the racially informed, differential incorporation of migrants at home and official attempts to securitize a putative European identity; it concludes by formulating a number of characteristics of racial Eastern-Europeanization in the context of the contemporary securitarian governmentality through which the Roma minority tends to be managed in Europe.

Reference:

Goldberg, David Theo. 2009. The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism. Malden (MA) and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.